← catalogue

The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States

by Walter L. Fleming · English · Gutenberg #2897 · 434,465 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States

Author: Walter L. Fleming


        
Release date: November 1, 2001 [eBook #2897]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2897

Credits: Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's University, and Alev Akman


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEQUEL OF APPOMATTOX: A CHRONICLE OF THE REUNION OF THE STATES ***

The Sequel of Appomattox

Textbook Edition
       ∵
Volume 32 of the
Chronicles of America Series

Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys


The Sequel of Appomattox

By Walter Lynwood Fleming

A Chronicle Of the Reunion of the States


New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919


Copyright, 1919
by Yale University Press

Contents.
        The Sequel of Appomattox
Chapter        Chapter Title            Page
   I.   The Aftermath of War              1
  II.   When Freedom Cried Out           34
 III.   The Work of the Presidents       54
  IV.   The Wards of the Nation          89
   V.   The Victory of the Radicals     118
  VI.   The Rule of the Major Generals  140
 VII.   The Trial of President Johnson  158
VIII.   The Union League of America     174
  IX.   Church and School               196
   X.   Carpetbag and Negro Rule        221
  XI.   The Ku Klux Movement            243
 XII.   The Changing South              265
XIII.   Restoration of Home Rule        282
        Bibliographical Note            305
        Index                           309



THE SEQUEL OF APPOMATTOX

∵
CHAPTER I.

The Aftermath of War

When the armies of the Union and of the Confederacy were disbanded in
1865, two matters had been settled beyond further dispute: the negro was
to be free, and the Union was to be perpetuated. But though slavery and
state sovereignty were no longer at issue, there were still many
problems which pressed for solution. The huge task of reconstruction
must be faced. The nature of the situation required that the measures of
reconstruction be first formulated in Washington by the victors and then
worked out in the conquered South. Since the success of these policies
would depend in a large measure upon their acceptability to both
sections of the country, it was expected that the North would be
influenced to some extent by the attitude of the Southern people, which
in turn would be determined largely by local conditions in the South.
The situation in the South at the close of the Civil War is therefore
the point at which this narrative of the reconstruction naturally takes
its beginning.

The surviving Confederate soldiers came straggling back to communities
which were now far from being satisfactory dwelling places for civilized
people. Everywhere they found missing many of the best of their former
neighbors. They found property destroyed, the labor system disorganized,
and the inhabitants in many places suffering from want. They found the
white people demoralized and sometimes divided among themselves, and the
negroes free, bewildered, and disorderly, for organized government had
lapsed with the surrender of the Confederate armies.

Beneath a disorganized society lay a devastated land. The destruction of
property affected all classes of the population. The accumulated capital
of the South had disappeared in worthless Confederate stocks, bonds, and
currency. The banks had failed early in the war. Two billion dollars
invested in slaves had been wiped out. Factories which had been running
before the war, or were developed after 1861 in order to supply the
blockaded country, had been destroyed by Federal raiders or seized and
sold or dismantled because they had furnished supplies to the
Confederacy. Mining industries were paralyzed. Public buildings which
had been used for war purposes were destroyed or confiscated for the
uses of the army or for the new freedmen's schools. It was months before
courthouses, state capitols, school and college buildings were again
made available for normal uses. The military school buildings had been
destroyed by the Federal forces. Among the schools which suffered were
the Virginia Military Institute, the University of Alabama, the
Louisiana State Seminary, and many smaller institutions. Nearly all
these had been used in some way for war purposes and were therefore
subject to destruction or confiscation.

The farmers and planters found themselves "land poor." The soil
remained, but there was a prevalent lack of labor, of agricultural
equipment, of farm stock, of seeds, and of money with which to make good
the deficiency. As a result, a man with hundreds of acres might be as
poor as a negro refugee. The desolation is thus described by a Virginia
farmer:

From Harper's Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles ... the
country was almost a desert.... We had no cattle, hogs, sheep, or horse
or anything else. The fences were all gone. Some of the orchards were
very much injured, but the fruit trees had not been destroyed. The barns
were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing
without roof, or door, or window.

Much land was thrown on the market at low prices--three to five dollars
an acre for land worth fifty dollars. The poorer lands could not be sold
at all, and thousands of farms were deserted by their owners. Everywhere
recovery from this agricultural depression was slow. Five years after
the war Robert Somers, an English traveler, said of the Tennessee
Valley:

It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin and
plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete....
The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up
gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories ... and in large tracts
of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads,
long neglected, are in disorder, and having in many places become
impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields
without much respect to boundaries.

Similar conditions existed wherever the armies had passed, and not in
the country districts alone. Many of the cities, such as Richmond,
Charleston, Columbia, Jackson, Atlanta, and Mobile had suffered from
fire or bombardment.

There were few stocks of merchandise in the South when the war ended,
and Northern creditors had lost so heavily through the failure of
Southern merchants that they were cautious about extending credit again.
Long before 1865 all coin had been sent out in contraband trade through
the blockade. That there was a great need of supplies from the outside
world is shown by the following statement of General Boynton:

Window-glass has given way to thin boards, in railway coaches and in the
cities. Furniture is marred and broken, and none has been replaced for
four years. Dishes are cemented in various styles, and half the pitchers
have tin handles. A complete set of crockery is never seen, and in very
few families is there enough to set a table.... A set of forks with
whole tines is a curiosity. Clocks and watches have nearly all
stopped.... Hair brushes and tooth brushes have all worn out; combs are
broken.... Pins, needles, and thread, and a thousand such articles,
which seem indispensable to housekeeping, are very scarce. Even in
weaving on the looms, corncobs have been substituted for spindles. Few
have pocket knives. In fact, everything that has heretofore been an
article of sale at the South is wanting now. At the tables of those who
were once esteemed luxurious providers you will find neither tea,
coffee, sugar, nor spices of any kind. Even candles, in some cases, have
been replaced by a cup of grease in which a piece of cloth is plunged
for a wick.

This poverty was prolonged and rendered more acute by the lack of
transportation. Horses, mules, wagons, and carriages were scarce, the
country roads were nearly impassable, and bridges were in bad repair or
had been burned or washed away. Steamboats had almost disappeared from
the rivers. Those which had escaped capture as blockade runners had been
subsequently destroyed or were worn out. Postal facilities, which had
been poor enough during the last year of the Confederacy, were entirely
lacking for several months after the surrender.

The railways were in a state of physical dilapidation little removed
from destruction, save for those that had been captured and kept in
partial repair by the Federal troops. The rolling stock had been lost by
capture, by destruction to prevent capture, in wrecks, which were
frequent, or had been worn out. The railroad companies possessed large
sums in Confederate currency and in securities which were now valueless.
About two-thirds of all the lines were hopelessly bankrupt. Fortunately,
the United States War Department took over the control of the railway
lines and in some cases effected a temporary reorganization which could
not have been accomplished by the bankrupt companies. During the summer
and fall of 1865 "loyal" boards of directors were appointed for most of
the roads, and the army withdrew its control. But repairs and
reconstruction were accomplished with difficulty because of the
demoralization of labor and the lack of funds or credit. Freight was
scarce and, had it not been for government shipments, some of the
railroads would have been abandoned. Not many people were able to
travel. It is recorded that on one trip from Montgomery to Mobile and
return, a distance of 360 miles, the railroad which is now the
Louisville and Nashville collected only thirteen dollars in fares.

Had there been unrestricted commercial freedom in the South in 1865-66,
the distress of the people would have been somewhat lessened, for here
and there were to be found public and private stores of cotton, tobacco,
rice, and other farm products, all of which were bringing high prices in
the market. But for several months the operation of wartime laws and
regulations hindered the distribution of even these scanty stores.
Property upon which the Confederate Government had a claim was of course
subject to confiscation, and private property offered for sale, even
that of Unionists, was subject to a 25 per cent tax on sales, a shipping
tax, and a revenue tax. The revenue tax on cotton, ranging from two to
three cents a pound during the three years after the war, brought in
over $68,000,000. This tax, with other Federal revenues, yielded much
more than the entire expenses of reconstruction from 1865 to 1868 and of
all relief measures for the South, both public and private. After May,
1865, the 25 per cent tax was imposed only upon the produce of slave
labor. None of the war taxes, except that on cotton, was levied upon the
crops of 1866, but while these taxes lasted they seriously impeded the
resumption of trade.

Even these restrictions, however, might have been borne if only they had
been honestly applied. Unfortunately, some of the most spectacular
frauds ever perpetrated were carried through in connection with the
attempt of the United States Treasury Department to collect and sell the
confiscable property in the South. The property to be sold consisted of
what had been captured and seized by the army and the navy, of
"abandoned" property, as such was called whose owner was absent in the
Confederate service, and of property subject to seizure under the
confiscation acts of Congress. No captures were made after the general
surrender, and no further seizures of "abandoned" property were made
after Johnson's amnesty proclamation of May 29, 1865. This left only the
"confiscable" property to be collected and sold.

For collection purposes the States of the South were divided into
districts, each under the supervision of an agent of the Treasury
Department, who received a commission of about 25 per cent. Cotton,
regarded as the root of the slavery evil, was singled out as the
principal object of confiscation. It was known that the Confederate
Government had owned in 1865 about 150,000 bales, but the records were
defective and much of it, with no clear indication of ownership, still
remained with the producers. Secretary Chase, foreseeing the difficulty
of effecting a just settlement, counseled against seizure, but his
judgment was overruled. Secretary McCulloch said of his agents: "I am
sure I sent some honest cotton agents South; but it sometimes seems
doubtful whether any of them remained honest very long." Some of the
natives, even, became cotton thieves. In a report made in 1866,
McCulloch describes their methods:

Contractors, anxious for gain, were sometimes guilty of bad faith and
peculation, and frequently took possession of cotton and delivered it
under contracts as captured or abandoned, when in fact it was not such,
and they had no right to touch it.... Residents and others in the
districts where these peculations were going on took advantage of the
unsettled condition of the country, and representing themselves as
agents of this department, went about robbing under such pretended
authority, and thus added to the difficulties of the situation by
causing unjust opprobrium and suspicion to rest upon officers engaged in
the faithful discharge of their duties. Agents, ... frequently received
or collected property, and sent it forward which the law did not
authorize them to take.... Lawless men, singly and in organized bands,
engaged in general plunder; every species of intrigue and peculation and
theft were resorted to.

These agents turned over to the United States about $34,000,000. About
40,000 claimants were subsequently indemnified on the ground that the
property taken from them did not belong to the Confederate Government,
but many thousands of other claimants have been unable to prove that
their property was seized by government agents and hence have received
nothing. It is probable that the actual Confederate property was nearly
all stolen by the agents. One agent in Alabama sold an appointment as
assistant for $25,000, and a few months later both the assistant and the
agent were tried by a military court for stealing and were fined $90,000
and $250,000 respectively in addition to being imprisoned.

Other property, including horses, mules, wagons, tobacco, rice, and
sugar which the natives claimed as their own, was seized. In some places
the agents even collected delinquent Confederate taxes. Much of the
confiscable property was not sold but was turned over to the Freedmen's
Bureau ¹ for its support. The total amount seized cannot be
satisfactorily ascertained. The Ku Klux minority report asserted that
3,000,000 bales of cotton were taken, of which the United States
received only 114,000. It is certain that, owing to the deliberate
destruction of cotton by fire in 1864-65, this estimate was too high,
but all the testimony points to the fact that the frauds were
stupendous. As a result the United States Government did not succeed in
obtaining the Confederate property to which it had a claim, and the
country itself was stripped of necessities to a degree that left it not
only destitute but outraged and embittered. "Such practices," said
Trowbridge, "had a pernicious effect, engendering a contempt for the
Government and a murderous ill-will which too commonly vented itself
upon soldiers and negroes."

¹ See pp. 89 et seq.

The South faced the work of reconstruction not only with a shortage of
material and greatly hampered in the employment even of that but still
more with a shortage of men. The losses among the whites are usually
estimated at about half the military population, but since accurate
records are lacking the exact numbers cannot be ascertained. The best of
the civil leaders, as well as the prominent military leaders, had so
committed themselves to the support of the Confederacy as to be excluded
from participation in any reconstruction that might be attempted. The
business of reconstruction, therefore, fell of necessity to the
Confederate private soldiers, the lower officers, nonparticipants, and
lukewarm individuals who had not greatly compromised themselves. These
politically and physically uninjured survivors included also all the
"slackers" of the Confederacy. But though there were such physical and
moral losses on the part of those to whom fell the direction of affairs
there was also a moral strengthening in the sound element of the people
who had been tried by the discipline of war.

The greatest weakness of both races was their extreme poverty. The crops
of 1865 turned out badly, for most of the soldiers reached home too late
for successful planting and the negro labor was not dependable. The sale
of such cotton and farm products as had escaped the treasury agents was
of some help, but curiously enough much of the good money thus obtained
was spent extravagantly by a people used to Confederate rag money and
for four years deprived of the luxuries of life. The poorer whites who
had lost all were close to starvation. In the white counties which had
sent so large a proportion of men to the army the destitution was most
acute. In many families the breadwinner had been killed in war. After
1862 relief systems had been organized in nearly all the Confederate
States for the purpose of aiding the poor whites, but these
organizations were disbanded in 1865. A Freedmen's Bureau official
traveling through the desolate back country furnishes a description
which might have applied to two hundred counties, a third of the South:
"It is a common, an every-day sight in Randolph County, that of women
and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging
for bread from door to door. Meat of any kind has been a stranger to
many of their mouths for months. The drought cut off what little crops
they hoped to save, and they must have immediate help or perish. By far
the greater suffering exists among the whites. Their scanty supplies
have been exhausted, and now they look to the Government alone for
support. Some are without homes of any description."

Where the armies had passed, few of the people, white or black,
remained; most of them had been forced as "refugees" within the Union
lines or into the interior of the Confederacy. Now, along with the
disbanded Confederate soldiers, they came straggling back to their
war-swept homes. It was estimated, in December, 1865 that in the States
of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, there were five hundred thousand
white people who were without the necessaries of life; numbers died from
lack of food. Within a few months relief agencies were at work. In the
North, especially in the border States and in New York, charitable
organizations collected and forwarded great quantities of supplies to
the negroes and to the whites in the hill and mountain counties. The
reorganized state and local governments sent food from the unravaged
portions of the Black Belt to the nearest white counties, and the army
commanders gave some aid. As soon as the Freedmen's Bureau was
organized, it fed to the limit of its supplies the needy whites as well
as the blacks.

The extent of the relief afforded by the charity of the North and by the
agencies of the United States Government is not now generally
remembered, probably on account of the later objectionable activities of
the Freedmen's Bureau, but it was at the time properly appreciated. A
Southern journalist, writing of what he saw in Georgia, remarked that
"it must be a matter of gratitude as well as surprise for our people to
see a Government which was lately fighting us with fire and sword and
shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed. In the immense
crowds which throng the distributing house, I notice the mothers and
fathers, widows and orphans of our soldiers.... Again, the Confederate
soldier, with one leg or one arm, the crippled, maimed, and broken, and
the worn and destitute men, who fought bravely their enemies then, their
benefactors now, have their sacks filled and are fed."

Acute distress continued until 1867; after that year there was no
further danger of starvation. Some of the poor whites, especially in the
remote districts, never again reached a comfortable standard of living;
some were demoralized by too much assistance; others were discouraged
and left the South for the West or the North. But the mass of the people
accepted the discipline of poverty and made the best of their situation.

The difficulties, however, that beset even the courageous and the
competent were enormous. The general paralysis of industry, the breaking
up of society, and poverty on all sides bore especially hard on those
who had not previously been manual laborers. Physicians could get
practice enough but no fees; lawyers who had supported the Confederacy
found it difficult to get back into the reorganized courts because of
the test oaths and the competition of "loyal" attorneys; and for the
teachers there were few schools. We read of officers high in the
Confederate service selling to Federal soldiers the pies and cakes
cooked by their wives, of others selling fish and oysters which they
themselves had caught, and of men and women hitching themselves to plows
when they had no horse or mule.

Such incidents must, from their nature, have been infrequent, but they
show to what straits some at least were reduced. Six years after the
war, James S. Pike, then in South Carolina, mentions cases which might
be duplicated in nearly every old Southern community: "In the vicinity,"
he says, "lived a gentleman whose income when the war broke out was
rated at $150,000 a year. Not a vestige of his whole vast estate remains
today. Not far distant were the estates of a large proprietor and a well
known family, rich and distinguished for generations. The slaves were
gone. The family is gone. A single scion of the house remains, and he
peddles tea by the pound and molasses by the quart, on a corner of the
old homestead, to the former slaves of the family and thereby earns his
livelihood."

General Lee's good example influenced many. Commercial enterprises were
willing to pay for the use of his name and reputation, but he wished to
farm and could get no opportunity. "They are offering my father
everything," his daughter said, "except the only thing he will accept, a
place to earn honest bread while engaged in some useful work." This
remark led to an offer of the presidency of Washington College, now
Washington and Lee University, which he accepted. "I have a self-imposed
task which I must accomplish," he said, "I have led the young men of the
South in battle; I have seen many of them fall under my standard. I
shall devote my life now to training young men to do their duty in
life."

The condition of honest folk was still further troubled by a general
spirit of lawlessness in many regions. Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas,
and Louisiana recognized the "Union" state government, but the coming of
peace brought legal anarchy to the other States of the Confederacy. The
Confederate state and local governments were abolished as the armies of
occupation spread over the South, and for a period of four or six months
there was no government except that exercised by the commanders of the
military garrisons left behind when the armies marched away. Even before
the surrender the local governments were unable to make their authority
respected, and soon after the war ended parts of the country became
infested with outlaws, pretend treasury agents, horse thieves, cattle
thieves, and deserters. Away from the military posts only lynch law
could cope with these elements of disorder. With the aid of the army in
the more settled regions, and by extra-legal means elsewhere, the
outlaws, thieves, cotton burners, and house burners were brought
somewhat under control even before the state governments were
reorganized, though the embers of lawlessness continued to smolder.

The relations between the Federal soldiers stationed in the principal
towns and the native white population were not, on the whole, so bad as
might have been expected. If the commanding officer were well disposed,
there was little danger of friction, though sometimes his troops got out
of hand. The regulars had a better reputation than the volunteers. The
Confederate soldiers were surfeited with fighting, but the
"stay-at-home" element was often a cause of trouble. The problem of
social relations between the conquerors and the conquered was
troublesome. The men might get along well together, but the women would
have nothing do with the "Yankees" and ill feeling arose because of
their antipathy. Carl Schurz reported that "the soldier of the Union is
looked upon as a stranger, an intruder, as the 'Yankee,' the 'enemy.'...
The existence and intensity of this aversion is too well known to those
who have served or are serving in the South to require proof."

In retaliation the soldiers developed ingenious ways of annoying the
whites. Women, forced for any reason to go to headquarters, were made to
take the oath of allegiance or the "ironclad" oath before their requests
were granted; flags were fastened over doors, gates, or sidewalks in
order to irritate the recalcitrant dames and their daughters.
Confederate songs and color combinations were forbidden. In Richmond,
General Halleck ordered that no marriages be performed unless the bride,
the groom, and the officiating clergyman took the oath of allegiance. He
explained this as a measure taken to prevent "the propagation of
legitimate rebels."

The wearing of Confederate uniforms was forbidden by military order, but
by May, 1865, few soldiers possessed regulation uniforms. In Tennessee
the State also imposed fines upon wearers of the uniform. In the
vicinity of military posts buttons and marks of rank were usually
ordered removed and the gray clothes dyed with some other color. General
Lee, for example, had the buttons on his coat covered with cloth. But
frequently the Federal commander, after issuing the orders, paid no more
attention to the matter and such conflicts as arose on account of the
uniform were usually caused by officious enlisted men and the negro
troops. Whitelaw Reid relates the following incident:

Nothing was more touching, in all that I saw in Savannah, than the
almost painful effort of the rebels, from generals down to privates, to
conduct themselves so as to evince respect for our soldiers, and to
bring no severer punishment upon the city than it had already received.
There was a brutal scene at the hotel, where a drunken sergeant, with a
pair of tailor's shears, insisted on cutting the buttons from the
uniform of an elegant gray-headed old brigadier, who had just come in
from Johnston's army; but he bore himself modestly and very handsomely
through it. His staff was composed of fine-looking, stalwart fellows,
evidently gentlemen, who appeared intensely mortified at such treatment.
They had no clothes except their rebel uniforms, and had, as yet, had no
time to procure others, but they avoided disturbances and submitted to
what they might, with some propriety, and with the general approval of
our officers, have resented.

The negro troops, even at their best, were everywhere considered
offensive by the native whites. General Grant, indeed, urged that only
white troops be used to garrison the interior. But the negro soldier,
impudent by reason of his new freedom, his new uniform, and his new gun,
was more than Southern temper could tranquilly bear, and race conflicts
were frequent. A New Orleans newspaper thus states the Southern point of
view: "Our citizens who had been accustomed to meet and treat the
negroes only as respectful servants, were mortified, pained, and shocked
to encounter them ... wearing Federal uniforms and bearing bright
muskets and gleaming bayonets.... They are jostled from the sidewalks by
dusky guards, marching four abreast. They were halted, in rude and
sullen tones, by negro sentinels."

The task of the Federal forces was not easy. The garrisons were not
large enough nor numerous enough to keep order in the absence of civil
government. The commanders in the South asked in vain for cavalry to
police the rural districts. Much of the disorder, violence, and
incendiarism attributed at the time to lawless soldiers appeared later
to be due to discharged soldiers and others pretending to be soldiers in
order to carry out schemes of robbery. The whites complained vigorously
of the garrisons, and petitions were sent to Washington from mass
meetings and from state legislatures asking for their removal. The
higher commanders, however, bore themselves well, and in a few fortunate
cases Southern whites were on most amicable terms with the garrison
commanders. The correspondence of responsible military officers in the
South shows how earnestly and considerately each, as a rule, tried to
work out his task. The good sense of most of the Federal officers
appeared when, after the murder of Lincoln, even General Grant for a
brief space lost his head and ordered the arrest of paroled
Confederates.

The church organizations were as much involved in the war and in the
reconstruction as were secular institutions. Before the war every
religious organization having members North and South, except the
Catholic Church and the Jews, had separated into independent Northern
and Southern bodies. In each section church feeling ran high, and when
the war came the churches supported the armies. As the Federal armies
occupied Southern territory, the church buildings of each denomination
were turned over to the corresponding Northern body, and Southern
ministers were permitted to remain only upon agreeing to conduct "loyal
services, pray for the President of the United States and for Federal
victories" and to foster "loyal sentiment." The Protestant Episcopal
churches in Alabama were closed from September to December, 1865, and
some congregations were dispersed by the soldiers because Bishop Wilmer
had directed his clergy to omit the prayer for President Davis but had
substituted no other. The ministers of non-liturgical churches were not
so easily controlled. A Georgia Methodist preacher directed by a Federal
officer to pray for the President said afterwards: "I prayed for the
President that the Lord would take out of him and his allies the hearts
of beasts and put into them the hearts of men or remove the cusses from
office." Sometimes members of a congregation showed their resentment at
the "loyal" prayers by leaving the church. But in spite of many
irritations both sides frequently managed to get some amusement out of
the "loyal" services. The church situation was, however, a serious
matter during and after the reconstruction, and some of its later phases
will have to be discussed elsewhere.

The Unionist, or "Tory," of the lower and eastern South found himself,
in 1865, a man without a country. Few in number in any community, they
found themselves upon their return from a harsh exile the victims of
ostracism or open hostility. One of them, William H. Smith, later
Governor of Alabama, testified that the Southern people "manifest the
most perfect contempt for a man who is known to be an unequivocal Union
man; they call him a 'galvanized Yankee' and apply other terms and
epithets to him." General George H. Thomas, speaking of a region more
divided in sentiment than Alabama, remarked that "Middle Tennessee is
disturbed by animosities and hatreds, much more than it is by the
disloyalty of persons towards the Government of the United States. Those
personal animosities would break out and overawe the civil authorities,
but for the presence there of the troops of the United States.... They
are more unfriendly to Union men, natives of the State of Tennessee, or
of the South, who have been in the Union army, than they are to men of
Northern birth."

In the border States society was sharply divided and feeling was bitter.
In eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and parts of
Arkansas and Missouri returning Confederates met harsher treatment than
did the Unionists in the lower South. Trowbridge says of east Tennessee:
"Returning rebels were robbed; and if one had stolen unawares to his
home, it was not safe for him to remain there. I saw in Virginia one of
these exiles, who told me how homesickly he pined for the hills and
meadows of east Tennessee, which he thought the most delightful region
in the world. But there was a rope hanging from a tree for him there,
and he dared not go back. 'The bottom rails are on top,' said he, 'that
is the trouble.' The Union element, and the worst part of the Union
element, was uppermost." Confederates and Confederate sympathizers in
Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky were disfranchised. In
West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, "war trespass" suits were
brought against returning Confederates for military acts done in war
time. In Missouri and West Virginia strict test oaths excluded
Confederates from office, from the polls, and from the professions of
teaching, preaching, and law. On the other hand in central and western
Kentucky the predominant Unionist population, themselves suffering
through the abolition of slavery, and by the objectionable operations of
the Freedmen's Bureau and the unwise military administration, showed
more sympathy for the Confederates, welcomed them home, and soon
relieved them of all restrictions.

Still another element of discord was added by the Northerners who came
to exploit the South. Many mustered-out soldiers proposed to stay.
Speculators of all kinds followed the withdrawing Confederate lines and
with the conclusion of peace spread through the country; but they were
not cordially received. With the better class, the Southerners,
especially the soldiers, associated freely if seldom intimately. But the
conduct of a few of their number who considered that the war had opened
all doors to them, who very freely expressed their views, gave advice,
condemned old customs, and were generally offensive, did much to bring
all Northerners into disrepute. Tactlessly critical letters published in
Northern papers did not add to their popularity. The few Northern women
felt the ostracism more keenly than did the men. Benjamin C. Truman, an
agent of President Johnson, thus summed up the situation: "There is a
prevalent disposition not to associate too freely with Northern men or
to receive them into the circles of society; but it is far from
unsurmountable. Over Southern society, as over every other, woman reigns
supreme, and they are more embittered against those whom they deem the
authors of all their calamities than are their brothers, sons, and
husbands." But of the thousands of Northern men who overcame the
reluctance of the Southerners to social intercourse little was heard.
Many a Southern planter secured a Northern partner, or sold him half his
plantation to get money to run the other half. For the irritations of
1865 each party must take its share of responsibility.

Had the South assisted in a skillful and adequate publicity, much
disastrous misunderstanding might have been avoided. The North knew as
little of the South as the South did of the North, but the North was
eager for news. Able newspaper correspondents like Sidney Andrews of the
Boston Advertiser and the Chicago Tribune, who opposed President
Johnson's policies, Thomas W. Knox of the New York Herald, who had given
General Sherman so much trouble in Tennessee, Whitelaw Reid, who wrote
for several papers and tried cotton planting in Louisiana, and John T.
Trowbridge, New England author and journalist, were dispatched
southwards. Chief of the President's investigators was General Carl
Schurz, German revolutionist, Federal soldier, and soon to be radical
Republican, who held harsh views of the Southern people; and there were
besides Harvey M. Watterson, Kentucky Democrat and Unionist, the father
of "Marse" Henry; Benjamin C. Truman, New England journalist and
soldier, whose long report was perhaps the best of all; Chief Justice
Chase, who was thinking mainly of "How soon can the negro vote?"; and
General Grant, who made a report so brief that, notwithstanding its
value, it attracted little attention. In addition, a constant stream of
information and misinformation was going northward from treasury agents,
officers of the army, the Freedmen's Bureau, teachers, and missionaries.
Among foreigners who described the conquered land were Robert Somers,
Henry Latham, and William Hepworth Dixon. But few in the South realized
the importance of supplying the North with correct information about
actual conditions. The letters and reports, they thought, humiliated
them; inquiry was felt to be prying and gloating. "Correspondents have
added a new pang to surrender," it was said. The South was proud and
refused to be catechized. From the Northern point of view the South, a
new and strange region, with strange customs and principles, was of
course not to be considered as quite normal and American, but there was
on the part of many correspondents a determined attempt to describe
things as they were. And yet the North persisted in its unsympathetic
queries when it seemed to have a sufficient answer in the reports of
Grant, Schurz, and Truman.

Grant's opinion was short and direct: "I am satisfied that the mass of
thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in
good faith.... The citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return
to self-government within the Union as soon as possible." Truman came to
the conclusion that "the rank and file of the disbanded Southern army
... are the backbone and sinew of the South.... To the disbanded
regiments of the rebel army, both officers and men, I look with great
confidence as the best and altogether the most hopeful element of the
South, the real basis of reconstruction and the material of worthy
citizenship." General John Tarbell, before the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, testified that "there are, no doubt, disloyal and
disorderly persons in the South, but it is an entire mistake to apply
these terms to a whole people. I would as soon travel alone, unarmed,
through the South as through the North. The South I left is not at all
the South I hear and read about in the North. From the sentiment I hear
in the North, I would scarcely recognize the people I saw, and, except
their politics, I liked so well. I have entire faith that the better
classes are friendly to the negroes."

Carl Schurz on the other hand was not so favorably impressed. "The
loyalty of the masses and most of the leaders of the southern people,"
he said, "consists in submission to necessity. There is, except in
individual instances, an entire absence of that national spirit which
forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism." Another government
official in Florida was quite doubtful of the Southern whites. "I would
pin them down at the point of the bayonet," he declared, "so close that
they would not have room to wiggle, and allow intelligent colored people
to go up and vote in preference to them. The only Union element in the
South proper ... is among the colored people. The whites will treat you
very kindly to your face, but they are deceitful. I have often thought,
and so expressed myself, that there is so much deception among the
people of the South since the rebellion, that if an earthquake should
open and swallow them up, I was fearful that the devil would be
dethroned and some of them take his place."

The point of view of the Confederate military leaders was exhibited by
General Wade Hampton in a letter to President Johnson and by General Lee
in his advice to Governor Letcher of Virginia. General Hampton wrote:
"The South unequivocally 'accepts the situation' in which she is placed.
Everything that she has done has been done in perfect faith, and in the
true and highest sense of the word, she is loyal. By this I mean that
she intends to abide by the laws of the land honestly, to fulfill all
her obligations faithfully and to keep her word sacredly, and I assert
that the North has no right to demand more of her. You have no right to
ask, or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that
Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of her
best blood and all her treasures." General Lee in order to set an
example applied through General Grant for a pardon under the amnesty
proclamation and soon afterwards he wrote to Governor Letcher: "All
should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war, and to
restore the blessings of peace. They should remain, if possible, in the
country; promote harmony and good-feeling; qualify themselves to vote;
and elect to the State and general legislatures wise and patriotic men,
who will devote their abilities to the interests of the country and the
healing of all dissensions; I have invariably recommended this course
since the cessation of hostilities, and have endeavored to practice it
myself."

Southerners of the Confederacy everywhere, then, accepted the
destruction of slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty; they
welcomed an early restoration of the Union, without any punishment of
leaders of the defeated cause. But they were proud of their Confederate
records though now legally "loyal" to the United States; they considered
the negro as free but inferior, and expected to be permitted to fix his
status in the social organization and to solve the problem of free labor
in their own way. To embarrass the easy and permanent realization of
these views there was a society disrupted, economically prostrate,
deprived of its natural leaders, subjected to a control not always
wisely conceived nor effectively exercised, and, finally, containing
within its own population unassimilated elements which presented
problems fraught with difficulty and danger.




CHAPTER II.

When Freedom Cried Out

The negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South.
Without the negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war
fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without
him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction
meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more
or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil
and political rights, and to improve his economic and social status. In
1861 the American negro was everywhere an inferior, and most of his race
were slaves; in 1865 he was no longer a slave, but whether he was to be
serf, ward, or citizen was an unsettled problem; in 1868 he was in the
South the legal and political equal, frequently the superior, of the
white; and before the end of the reconstruction period he was made by
the legislation of some States and by Congress the legal equal of the
white even in certain social matters.

The race problem which confronted the American people had no parallel in
the past. British and Spanish-American emancipation of slaves had
affected only small numbers or small regions, in which one race greatly
outnumbered the other. The results of these earlier emancipations of the
negroes and the difficulties of European states in dealing with subject
white populations were not such as to afford helpful example to American
statesmen. But since it was the actual situation in the Southern States
rather than the experience of other countries which shaped the policies
adopted during reconstruction, it is important to examine with some care
the conditions in which the negroes in the South found themselves at the
close of the war.

The negroes were not all helpless and without experience "when freedom
cried out." ¹ In the Border States and in the North there were, in 1861,
half a million free negroes accustomed to looking out for themselves.
Nearly 200,000 negro men were enlisted in the United States army between
1862 and 1865, and many thousands of slaves had followed raiding Federal
forces to freedom or had escaped through the Confederate lines. State
emancipation in Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and
the practical application of the Emancipation Proclamation where the
Union armies were in control ended slavery for many thousands more.
Wherever the armies marched, slavery ended. This was true even in
Kentucky, where the institution was not legally abolished until the
adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Altogether more than a million
negroes were free and to some extent habituated to freedom before May,
1865.

¹ A negro phrase much used in referring to emancipation.

Most of these war-emancipated negroes were scattered along the borders
of the Confederacy, in camps, in colonies, in the towns, on refugee
farms, at work with the armies, or serving as soldiers in the ranks.
There were large working colonies along the Atlantic coast from Maryland
to Florida. The chief centers were near Norfolk, where General Butler
was the first to establish a "contraband" camp, in North Carolina, and
on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which had
been seized by the Federal fleet early in the war. To the Sea Islands
also were sent, in 1865, the hordes of negroes who had followed General
Sherman out of Georgia and South Carolina. Through the Border States
from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and along both sides of the
Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, there were other
refugee camps, farms, and colonies. For periods varying from one to four
years these free negroes had been at work, often amid conditions highly
unfavorable to health, under the supervision of officers of the Treasury
Department or of the army.

Emancipation was therefore a gradual process, and most of the negroes,
through their widening experience on the plantations, with the armies,
and in the colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they
had been in 1861. Even their years of bondage had done something for
them, for they knew how to work and they had adopted in part the
language, habits, religion, and morals of the whites. But slavery had
not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or educated. Frederick Douglass
said of the negro at the end of his servitude: "He had none of the
conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the
individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet.
He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave
to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose,
naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky."

To prove that he was free the negro thought he must leave his old
master, change his name, quit work for a time, perhaps get a new wife,
and hang around the Federal soldiers in camp or garrison, or go to the
towns where the Freedmen's Bureau was in process of organization. To the
negroes who remained at home--and, curiously enough, for a time at least
many did so--the news of freedom was made known somewhat ceremonially by
the master or his representative. The negroes were summoned to the "big
house," told that they were free, and advised to stay on for a share of
the crop. The description by Mrs. Clayton, the wife of a Southern
general, will serve for many: "My husband said, 'I think it best for me
to inform our negroes of their freedom.' So he ordered all the grown
slaves to come to him, and told them they no longer belonged to him as
property, but were all free. 'You are not bound to remain with me any
longer, and I have a proposition to make to you. If any of you desire to
leave, I propose to furnish you with a conveyance to move you, and with
provisions for the balance of the year.' The universal answer was,
'Master, we want to stay right here with you.' In many instances the
slaves were so infatuated with the idea of being, as they said, 'free as
birds' that they left their homes and consequently suffered; but our
slaves were not so foolish." ¹

¹ Black and White under the Old Régime, p. 152,

The negroes, however, had learned of their freedom before their old
masters returned from the war; they were aware that the issues of the
war involved in some way the question of their freedom or servitude, and
through the "grape vine telegraph," the news brought by the invading
soldiers, and the talk among the whites, they had long been kept fairly
well informed. What the idea of freedom meant to the negroes it is
difficult to say. Some thought that there would be no more work and that
all would be cared for by the Government; others believed that education
and opportunity were about to make them the equal of their masters. The
majority of them were too bewildered to appreciate anything except the
fact that they were free from enforced labor.

Conditions were most disturbed in the so-called "Black Belt," consisting
of about two hundred counties in the most fertile parts of the South,
where the plantation system was best developed and where by far the
majority of the negroes were segregated. The negroes in the four hundred
more remote and less fertile "white" counties, which had been less
disturbed by armies, were not so upset by freedom as those of the Black
Belt, for the garrisons and the larger towns, both centers of
demoralization, were in or near the Black Belt. But there was a moving
to and fro on the part of those who had escaped from the South or had
been captured during the war or carried into the interior of the South
to prevent capture. To those who left slavery and home to find freedom
were added those who had found freedom and were now trying to get back
home or to get away from the negro camps and colonies which were
breaking up. A stream of immigration which began to flow to the
southwest affected negroes as far as the Atlantic coast. In the
confusion of moving, families were broken up, and children, wife, or
husband were often lost to one another. The very old people and the
young children were often left behind for the former master to care for.
Regiments of negro soldiers were mustered out in every large town and
their numbers were added to the disorderly mass. Some of the Federal
garrisons and Bureau stations were almost overwhelmed by the numbers of
blacks who settled down upon them waiting for freedom to bestow its full
measure of blessing, and many of the negroes continued to remain in a
demoralized condition until the new year.

The first year of freedom was indeed a year of disease, suffering, and
death. Several partial censuses indicate that in 1865-66 the negro
population lost as many by disease as the whites had lost in war.
Ill-fed, crowded in cabins near the garrisons or entirely without
shelter, and unaccustomed to caring for their own health, the blacks who
were searching for freedom fell an easy prey to ordinary diseases and to
epidemics. Poor health conditions prevailed for several years longer. In
1870 Robert Somers remarked that "the health of the whites has greatly
improved since the war, while the health of the negroes has declined
till the mortality of the colored population, greater than the mortality
of the whites was before the war, has now become so markedly greater,
that nearly two colored die for every white person out of equal numbers
of each."

Morals and manners also suffered under the new dispensation. In the
crowded and disease-stricken towns and camps, the conditions under which
the roving negroes lived were no better for morals than for health, for
here there were none of the restraints to which the blacks had been
accustomed and which they now despised as being a part of their
servitude. But in spite of all the relief that could be given there was
much want. In fact, to restore former conditions the relief agencies
frequently cut off supplies in order to force the negroes back to work
and to prevent others from leaving the country for the towns. But the
hungry freedmen turned to the nearest food supply, and "spilin de
gypshuns" (despoiling the Egyptians, as the negroes called stealing from
the whites) became an approved means of support. Thefts of hogs, cattle,
poultry, field crops, and vegetables drove almost to desperation those
whites who lived in the vicinity of the negro camps. When the ex-slave
felt obliged to go to town, he was likely to take with him a team and
wagon and his master's clothes if he could get them.

The former good manners of the negro were now replaced by impudence and
distrust. There were advisers among the negro troops and other agitators
who assured them that politeness to whites was a mark of servitude.
Pushing and crowding in public places, on street cars and on the
sidewalks, and impudent speeches everywhere marked generally the limit
of rudeness. And the negroes were, in this respect, perhaps no worse
than those European immigrants who act upon the principle that bad
manners are a proof of independence.

The year following emancipation was one of religious excitement for
large numbers of the blacks. Before 1865 the negro church members were
attached to white congregations or were organized into missions, with
nearly always a white minister in charge and a black assistant. With the
coming of freedom the races very soon separated in religious matters.
For this there were two principal reasons: the negro preachers could
exercise more influence in independent churches; and new church
organizations from the North were seeking negro membership. Sometimes
negro members were urged to insist on the  "to sit together" with the
whites. In a Richmond church a negro from the street pushed his way to
the communion altar and knelt. There was a noticeable pause; then
General Robert E. Lee went forward and knelt beside the negro; and the
congregation followed his example. But this was a solitary instance.
When the race issue was raised by either color, the church membership
usually divided. There was much churchgoing by the negroes, day and
night, and church festivities and baptisms were common. The blacks
preferred immersion and wanted a new baptism each time they changed to a
new church. Baptizings in ponds, creeks, or rivers were great occasions
and were largely attended. "Shouting" the candidates went into the water
and "shouting" they came out. One old woman came up screaming, "Freed
from slavery! freed from sin! Bless God and General Grant!"

In the effort to realize their new-found freedom, the negroes were
heavily handicapped by their extreme poverty and their ignorance. The
total value of free negro property ran up into the millions in 1860, but
the majority of the negroes had nothing. There were a few educated
negroes in the South, and more in the North and in Canada, but the mass
of the race was too densely ignorant to furnish its own leadership. The
case, however, was not hopeless; the negro was able to work and in large
territories had little competition; wages were high, even though paid in
shares of the crop; the cost of living was low; and land was cheap.
Thousands seemed thirsty for an education and crowded the schools which
were available. It was too much, however, to expect the negro to take
immediate advantage of his opportunities. What he wanted was a long
holiday, a gun and a dog, and plenty of hunting and fishing. He must
have Saturday at least for a trip to town or to a picnic or a circus; he
did not wish to be a servant. When he had any money, swindlers reaped a
harvest. They sold him worthless finery, cheap guns, preparations to
bleach the skin or straighten the hair, and striped pegs which, when set
up on the master's plantation, would entitle the purchaser to "40 acres
and a mule."

The attitude of the negroes' employers not infrequently complicated the
situation which they sought to better. The old masters were, as a rule,
skeptical of the value of free negro labor. Carl Schurz thought this
attitude boded ill for the future: "A belief, conviction, or prejudice,
or whatever you may call it," he said, "so widely spread and apparently
deeply rooted as this, that the negro will not work without physical
compulsion, is certainly calculated to have a very serious influence
upon the conduct of the people entertaining it. It naturally produced a
desire to preserve slavery in its original form as much and as long as
possible ... or to introduce into the new system that element of
physical compulsion which would make the negro work."

The negro wished to be free to leave his job when he pleased, but, as
Benjamin C. Truman stated in his report to President Johnson, a "result
of the settled belief in the negro's inferiority, and in the necessity
that he should not be left to himself without a guardian, is that in
some sections he is discouraged from leaving his old master. I have
known of planters who considered it an offence against neighborhood
courtesy for another to hire their old hands, and in two instances that
were reported the disputants came to blows over the breach of
etiquette." The new Freedmen's Bureau insisted upon written contracts,
except for day laborers, and this undoubtedly kept many negroes from
working regularly, for they were suspicious of contracts. Besides, the
agitators and the negro troops led them to hope for an eventual
distribution of property. An Alabama planter thus described the
situation in December, 1865:

They will not work for anything but wages, and few are able to pay
wages. They are penniless but resolute in their demands. They expect to
see all the land divided out equally between them and their old masters
in time to make the next crop. One of the most intelligent black men I
know told me that in a neighboring village, where several hundred blacks
were congregated, he does not think that as many as three made
contracts, although planters are urgent in their solicitations and
offering highest prices for labor they can possibly afford to pay. The
same man informed me that the impression widely prevails that Congress
is about to divide out the lands, and that this impression is given out
by Federal soldiers at the nearest military station. It cannot be
disguised that in spite of the most earnest efforts of their old master
to conciliate and satisfy them, the estrangement between races increases
in its extent and bitterness. Nearly all the negro men are armed with
repeaters, and many of them carry them openly, day and night.

The relations between the races were better, however, than conditions
seemed to indicate. The whites of the Black Belt were better disposed
toward the negroes than were those of the white districts. It was in the
towns and villages that most of the race conflicts occurred. All whites
agreed that the negro was inferior, but there were many who were
grateful for his conduct during the war and who wished him well. But
others, the policemen of the towns, the "loyalists," those who had
little but pride of race and the vote to distinguish them from the
blacks, felt no good will toward the ex-slaves. It was Truman's opinion
"not only that the planters are far better friends to the negroes than
the poor whites, but also better than a majority of the Northern men who
go South to rent plantations." John T. Trowbridge, the novelist, who
recorded his impressions of the South after a visit in 1865, was of the
opinion that the Unionists "do not like niggers." "For there is," he
said, "more prejudice against color among the middle and poorer
classes--the Union men of the South who owned few or no slaves--than
among the planters who owned them by scores and hundreds." The reports
of the Freedmen's Bureau are to the same effect. A Bureau agent in
Tennessee testified: "An old citizen, a Union man, said to me, said he,
'I tell you what, if you take away the military from Tennessee, the
buzzards can't eat up the niggers as fast as we'll kill them.'"

The lawlessness of the negroes in parts of the Black Belt and the
disturbing influences of the black troops, of some officials of the
Bureau, and of some of the missionary teachers and preachers, caused the
whites to fear insurrections and to take measures for protection. Secret
semi-military organizations were formed which later developed into the
Ku Klux orders. When, however, New Year's Day, 1866 passed without the
hoped-for distribution of property the negroes began to settle down.

At the beginning of the period of reconstruction it seemed possible that
the negro race might speedily fall into distinct economic groups, for
there were some who had property and many others who had the ability and
the opportunity to acquire it; but the later drawing of race lines and
the political disturbances of reconstruction checked this tendency. It
was expected also that the Northern planters who came South in large
numbers in 1865-66 might, by controlling the negro labor and by the use
of more efficient methods, aid in the economic upbuilding of the
country. But they were ignorant of agricultural matters and incapable of
wisely controlling the blacks; and they failed because at one time they
placed too much trust in the negroes and at another treated them too
harshly and expected too much of them.

The question of negro suffrage was not a live issue in the South until
the middle of 1866. There was almost no talk about it among the negroes;
they did not know what it was. President Lincoln in 1864 and President
Johnson in 1865 had merely mentioned the subject, though Chief Justice
Chase and prominent radical members of Congress, as well as numerous
abolitionists, had framed a negro suffrage platform. But the Southern
whites, considering the matter an impossibility, gave it little
consideration. There was, however, both North and South, a tendency to
see a connection between the freedom of the negroes and their political
rights and thus to confuse civil equality with political and social
privileges. But the great masses of the whites were solidly opposed to
the recognition of negro equality in any form. The poorer whites,
especially the "Unionists" who hoped to develop an opposition party,
were angered by any discussion of the subject. An Alabama "Unionist," M.
J. Saffold, later prominent as a radical politician, declared to the
Joint Committee on Reconstruction: "If you compel us to carry through
universal suffrage of colored men ... it will prove quite an incubus
upon us in the organization of a national union party of white men; it
will furnish our opponents with a very effective weapon of offense
against us."

There were, however, some Southern leaders of ability and standing who,
by 1866, were willing to consider negro suffrage. These men, among them
General Wade Hampton of South Carolina and Governor Robert Patton of
Alabama, were of the slaveholding class, and they fully counted on being
able to control the negro's vote by methods similar to those actually
put in force a quarter of a century later. The negroes were not as yet
politically organized, were not even interested in politics, and the
master class might reasonably hope to regain control of them. Whitelaw
Reid published an interview with one of the Hamptons which describes the
situation exactly:

A brother of General Wade Hampton, the South Carolina Hotspur, was on
board. He saw no great objection to negro suffrage, so far as the whites
were concerned; and for himself, South Carolinian and secessionist
though he was, he was quite willing to accept it. He only dreaded its
effect on the blacks themselves. Hitherto they had in the main, been
modest and respectful, and mere freedom was not likely to spoil them.
But the deference to them likely to be shown by partisans eager for
their votes would have a tendency to uplift them and unbalance them.
Beyond this, no harm would be done the South by negro suffrage. The old
owners would cast the votes of their people almost as absolutely and
securely as they cast their own. If Northern men expected in this way to
build up a northern party in the South, they were gravely mistaken. They
would only be multiplying the power of the old and natural leaders of
Southern politics by giving every vote to a former slave. Heretofore
such men had served their masters only in the fields; now they would do
no less faithful service at the polls. If the North could stand it, the
South could. For himself, he should make no special objection to negro
suffrage as one of the terms of reorganization, and if it came, he did
not think the South would have much cause to regret it.

To sum up the situation at this time: the negro population at the close
of the war constituted a tremendous problem for those in authority. The
race was free, but without status, without leaders, without property,
and without education. Probably a fourth of them had some experience in
freedom before the Confederate armies surrendered, and the servitude of
the other three millions ended very quickly and without violence. But in
the Black Belt, where the bulk of the black population was to be found,
the labor system was broken up, and for several months the bewildered
freedmen wandered about or remained at home under conditions which were
bad for health, morals, and thrift. The Northern negroes did not furnish
the expected leadership for the race, and the more capable men in the
South showed a tendency to go North. The unsettled state of the negroes
and their expectation of receiving a part of the property of the whites
kept the latter uneasy and furnished the occasion of frequent conflicts.
Not the least of the unsettling influences at work upon the negro
population were the colored troops and the agitators furnished by the
Freedmen's Bureau, the missions, and the Bureau schools. But at the
beginning of the year 1866 the situation appeared to be clearing, and
the social and economic revolution seemed on the way to a quieter ending
than might have been expected.



CHAPTER III.

The Work of the Presidents

The war ended slavery, but it left the problem of the freed slave; it
preserved the Union in theory, but it left unsolved many delicate
problems of readjustment. Were the seceded States in or out of the
Union? If in the Union, what rights had they? If they were not in the
Union, what was their status? What was the status of the Southern
Unionist, of the ex-Confederate? What punishments should be inflicted
upon the Southern people? What authority, executive or legislative,
should carry out the work of reconstruction? The end of the war brought
with it, in spite of much discussion, no clear answer to these
perplexing questions.

Unfortunately, American political life, with its controversies over
colonial government, its conflicting interpretations of written
constitutions, and its legally trained statesmen, had by the middle of
the nineteenth century produced a habit of political thought which
demanded the settlement of most governmental matters upon a theoretical
basis. And now in 1865 each prominent leader had his own plan of
reconstruction fundamentally irreconcilable with all the others, because
rigidly theoretical. During the war the powers of the Executive had been
greatly expanded and a legislative reaction was to be expected. The
Constitution called for fresh interpretation in the light of the Civil
War and its results.

The first theory of reconstruction may be found in the
Crittenden-Johnson resolutions of July, 1861, which declared that the
war was being waged to maintain the Union under the Constitution and
that it should cease when these objects were obtained. This would have
been subscribed to in 1861 by the Union Democrats and by most of the
Republicans, and in 1865 the conquered Southerners would have been glad
to reënter the Union upon this basis; but though in 1865 the resolution
still expressed the views of many Democrats, the majority of Northern
people had moved away from this position.

The attitude of Lincoln, which in 1865 met the views of a majority of
the Northern people though not of the political leaders, was that "no
State can upon its mere motion get out of the Union," that the States
survived though there might be some doubt about state governments, and
that "loyal" state organizations might be established by a population
consisting largely of ex-Confederates who had been pardoned by the
President and made "loyal" for the future by an oath of allegiance.
Reconstruction was, Lincoln thought, a matter for the Executive to
handle. But that he was not inflexibly committed to any one plan is
indicated by his proclamation after the pocket veto of the Wade-Davis
Bill and by his last speech, in which he declared that the question of
whether the seceded States were in the Union or out of it was "merely a
pernicious abstraction." In addition, Lincoln said:

We are all agreed that the seceded States, so called, are out of their
proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of
the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to
again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is
not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or
even considering whether these States have ever been out of the Union,
than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly
immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing
the acts necessary to restore the proper practical relations between
these States and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge
his own opinion whether in doing the acts he brought the States from
without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never
having been out of it.

President Johnson's position was essentially that of Lincoln, but his
attitude toward the working out of the several problems was different.
He maintained that the States survived and that it was the duty of the
Executive to restore them to their proper relations. "The true theory,"
said he, "is that all pretended acts of secession were from the
beginning null and void. The States cannot commit treason nor screen
individual citizens who may have committed treason any more than they
can make valid treaties or engage in lawful commerce with any foreign
power. The States attempting to secede placed themselves in a condition
where their vitality was impaired, but not extinguished; their functions
suspended, but not destroyed." Lincoln would have had no severe
punishments inflicted even on leaders, but Johnson wanted to destroy the
"slavocracy," root and branch. Confiscation of estates would, he
thought, be a proper measure. He said on one occasion: "Traitors should
take a back seat in the work of restoration.... My judgment is that he
[a rebel] should be subjected to a severe ordeal before he is restored
to citizenship. Treason should be made odious, and traitors must be
punished and impoverished. Their great plantations must be seized, and
divided into small farms and sold to honest, industrious men." The
violence of Johnson's views subsequently underwent considerable
modification but to the last he held to the plan of executive
restoration based upon state perdurance. Neither Lincoln nor Johnson
favored a change of Southern institutions other than the abolition of
slavery, though each recommended a qualified negro suffrage.

There were, however, other theories in the field, notably those of the
radical Republican leaders. According to the state-suicide theory of
Charles Sumner, "any vote of secession or other act by which any State
may undertake to put an end to the supremacy of the Constitution within
its territory is inoperative and void against the Constitution, and when
sustained by force it becomes a practical abdication by the State of all
rights under the Constitution, while the treason it involves still
further works an instant forfeiture of all those functions and powers
essential to the continued existence of the State as a body politic, so
that from that time forward the territory falls under the exclusive
jurisdiction of Congress as other territory, and the State, being
according to the language of the law felo de se, ceases to exist."
Congress should punish the "rebels" by abolishing slavery, by giving
civil and political rights to negroes, and by educating them with the
whites.

Not essentially different, but harsher, was Thaddeus Stevens's plans for
treating the South as a conquered foreign province. Let the victors
treat the seceded States "as conquered provinces and settle them with
new men and exterminate or drive out the present rebels as exiles."
Congress in dealing with these provinces was not bound even by the
Constitution, "a bit of worthless parchment," but might legislate as it
pleased in regard to slavery, the ballot, and confiscation. With regard
to the white population he said: "I have never desired bloody
punishments to any great extent. But there are punishments quite as
appalling, and longer remembered, than death. They are more advisable,
because they would reach a greater number. Strip a proud nobility of
their bloated estates; reduce them to a level with plain republicans;
send them forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the
workshops or handle a plow, and you will thus humble the proud
traitors." Stevens and Sumner agreed in reducing the Southern States to
a territorial status. Sumner would then take the principles of the
Declaration of Independence as a guide for Congress, while Stevens would
leave Congress absolute. Neither considered the Constitution as of any
validity in this crisis.

As a rule the former abolitionists were in 1865 advocates of votes and
lands for the negro, in whose capacity for self-rule they had complete
confidence. The view of Gerrit Smith may be regarded as typical of the
abolitionist position:

Let the first condition of peace with them be that no people in the
rebel States shall ever lose or gain civil or political rights by reason
of their race or origin. The next condition of peace be that our black
allies in the South--those saviours of our nation--shall share with
their poor white neighbors in the subdivisions of the large landed
estates of the South. Let the only other condition be that the rebel
masses shall not, for say, a dozen years, be allowed access to the
ballot-box, or be eligible to office; and that the like restrictions be
for life on their political and military leaders.... The mass of the
Southern blacks fall, in point of intelligence, but little, if any,
behind the mass of the Southern whites.... In reference to the
qualifications of the voter, men make too much account of the head and
too little of the heart. The ballot-box, like God, says: "Give me your
heart." The best-hearted men are the best qualified to vote; and, in
this light, the blacks, with their characteristic gentleness, patience,
and affectionateness, are peculiarly entitled to vote. We cannot wonder
at Swedenborg's belief that the celestial people will be found in the
interior of Africa; nor hardly can we wonder at the legend that the gods
came down every year to sup with their favorite Africans.

One of the most statesmanlike proposals was made by Governor John A.
Andrew of Massachusetts. If, forgetting their theories, the
conservatives could have united in support of a restoration conceived in
his spirit, the goal might have been speedily achieved. Andrew demanded
a reorganization, based upon acceptance of the results of the war, but
carried through with the aid of "those who are by their intelligence and
character the natural leaders of their people and who surely will lead
them by and by." These men cannot be kept out forever, said he, for

the capacity of leadership is a gift, not a device. They whose courage,
talents, and will entitle them to lead, will lead.... If we cannot gain
their support of the just measures needful for the work of safe
reorganization, reorganization will be delusive and full of danger. They
are the most hopeful subjects to deal with. They have the brain and the
experience and the education to enable them to understand ... the
present situation. They have the courage as well as the skill to lead
the people in the direction their judgments point.... Is it consistent
with reason and our knowledge of human nature, to believe the masses of
Southern men able to face about, to turn their backs on those they have
trusted and followed, and to adopt the lead of those who have no
magnetic hold on their hearts or minds? It would be idle to reorganize
by the colored vote. If the popular vote of the white race is not to be
had in favor of the guarantees justly required, then I am in favor of
holding on--just where we are now. I am not in favor of a surrender of
the present rights of the Union to a struggle between a white minority
aided by the freedmen on one hand, against the majority of the white
race on the other. I would not consent, having rescued those states by
arms from Secession and rebellion, to turn them over to anarchy and
chaos.

The Southerners, Unionists as well as Confederates, had their views as
well, but at Washington these carried little influence. The former
Confederates would naturally favor the plan which promised best for the
white South, and their views were most nearly met by those of President
Lincoln. Although he held that in principle a new Union had arisen out
of the war, as a matter of immediate political expediency he was
prepared to build on the assumption that the old Union still existed.
The Southern Unionists cared little for theories; they wanted the
Confederates punished, themselves promoted to high offices, and the
negro kept from the ballot box.

Even at the beginning of 1866, it was not too much to hope that the
majority of former Republicans would accept conservative methods,
provided the so-called "fruits of the war" were assured--that is,
equality of civil rights, the guarantee of the United States war debt,
the repudiation of the Confederate debt, the temporary disfranchisement
of the leading Confederates, and some arrangement which would keep the
South from profiting by representation based on the non-voting negro
population. But amid many conflicting policies, none attained to
continuous and compelling authority.

The plan first put to trial was that of President Lincoln. It was a
definite plan designed to meet actual conditions and, had he lived, he
might have been able to carry it through successfully. Not a theorist,
but an opportunist of the highest type, sobered by years of
responsibility in war time, and fully understanding the precarious
situation in 1865, Lincoln was most anxious to secure an early
restoration of solidarity with as little friction as possible. Better
than most Union leaders he appreciated conditions in the South, the
problem of the races, the weakness of the Southern Unionists, and the
advantage of calling in the old Southern leaders. He was generous and
considerate; he wanted no executions or imprisonments; he wished the
leaders to escape; and he was anxious that the mass of Southerners be
welcomed back without loss of rights. "There is," he declared, "too
little respect for their rights," an unwillingness, in short, to treat
them as fellow citizens.

This executive policy had been applied from the beginning of the war as
pportunity offered. The President used the army to hold the Border
States in the Union, to aid in "reorganizing" Unionist Virginia and in
establishing West Virginia. The army, used to preserve the Union might
be used also to restore disturbed parts of it to normal condition.
Assuming that the "States" still existed, "loyal" state governments were
the first necessity. By his proclamation of December 8, 1863, Lincoln
suggested a method of beginning the reconstruction: he would pardon any
Confederate, except specified classes of leaders, who took an oath of
loyalty for the future; if as many as ten per cent of the voting
population of 1860, thus made loyal, should establish a state government
the Executive would recognize it. The matter of slavery must, indeed, be
left to the laws and proclamations as interpreted by the courts, but
other institutions should continue as in 1861.

This plan was inaugurated in four States which had been in part
controlled by the Federal army from nearly the beginning of the war:
Tennessee (1862), Louisiana (1862), Arkansas (1862), and Virginia after
the formation of West Virginia (1863). For each State, Lincoln appointed
a military governor: for Tennessee, Andrew Johnson; for Arkansas, John
S. Phelps; for Louisiana, General Shepley. In Virginia he recognized the
"reorganized" government, which had been transferred to Alexandria when
the new State of West Virginia was formed. The military governors
undertook the slow and difficult work of reorganization, however, with
but slight success owing to the small numbers of Unionists and of
Confederates who would take the oath. But by 1864 "ten per cent" state
governments were established in Arkansas and Louisiana, and progress was
being made in Tennessee.

Congress was impatient of Lincoln's claim to executive precedence in the
matter of reconstruction, and in 1864 both Houses passed the Wade-Davis
Bill, a plan which asserted the right of Congress to control
reconstruction and foreshadowed a radical settlement of the question.
Lincoln disposed of the bill by a pocket veto and, in a proclamation
dated July 8, 1864, stated that he was unprepared "to be inflexibly
committed to any single plan of restoration," or to discourage loyal
citizens by setting aside the governments already established in
Louisiana and Arkansas, or to recognize the authority of Congress to
abolish slavery. He was ready, however, to coöperate with the people of
any State who wished to accept the plan prepared by Congress and he
hoped that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery would be
adopted.

Lincoln early came to the conclusion that slavery must be destroyed, and
he had urgently advocated deportation of the freedmen, for he believed
that the two races could not live in harmony after emancipation. The
nearest he came to recommending the vote for the negro was in a
communication to Governor Hahn of Louisiana in March, 1864: "I barely
suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored
people may not be let in, as for instance, the very intelligent, and
especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would
probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty
within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the
public, but to you alone."

Throughout the war President Lincoln assumed that the state
organizations in the South were illegal because disloyal and that new
governments must be established. But just at the close of the war,
probably carried away by feeling, he all but recognized the Virginia
Confederate Government as competent to bring the State back into the
Union. While in Richmond on April 5, 1865, he gave to Judge Campbell a
statement of terms: the national authority to be restored; no recession
on slavery by the Executive; hostile forces to disband. The next day he
notified General Weitzel, in command at Richmond, that he might permit
the Virginia Legislature to meet and withdraw military and other support
from the Confederacy. But these measures met strong opposition in
Washington, especially from Secretary Stanton and Senator Wade and other
congressional leaders, and on the 11th of April Lincoln withdrew his
permission for the Legislature to meet. "I cannot go forward," he said,
"with everybody opposed to me." It was on the same day that he made his
last public speech, and Sumner, who was strongly opposed to his policy,
remarked that "the President's speech and other things augur confusion
and uncertainty in the future, with hot contumacy." At a cabinet meeting
on the 14th of April, Lincoln made his last statement on the subject. It
was fortunate, he said, that Congress had adjourned, for "we shall
reanimate the States" before Congress meets; there should be no killing,
no persecutions; there was too much disposition to treat the Southern
people "not as fellow citizens."

The possibility of a conciliatory restoration ended when Lincoln was
assassinated. Moderate, firm, tactful, of great personal influence, not
a doctrinaire, and not a Southerner like Johnson, Lincoln might have
"prosecuted peace" successfully. His policy was very unlike that
proposed by the radical leaders. They would base the new governments
upon the loyalty of the past plus the aid of enfranchised slaves; he
would establish the new régime upon the loyalty of the future. Like
Governor Andrew he thought that restoration must be effected by the
willing efforts of the South. He would aid and guide but not force the
people. If the latter did not wish restoration, they might remain under
military rule. There should be no forced negro suffrage, no sweeping
disfranchisement of whites, no "carpetbaggism."

The work of President Johnson demands for its proper understanding some
consideration of the condition of the political parties at the close of
the war, for politics had much to do with reconstruction. The Democratic
party, divided and defeated in the election of 1860, lost its Southern
members in 1861 by the secession and remained a minority party during
the remainder of the war. It retained its organization, however, and in
1864 polled a large vote. Discredited by its policy of opposition to
Lincoln's Administration, its ablest leaders joined the Republicans in
support of the war. Until 1869 the party was poorly represented in
Congress although, as soon as hostilities ended, the War Democrats
showed a tendency to return to the old party. As to reconstruction, the
party stood on the Crittenden-Johnson resolutions of 1861, though most
Democrats were now willing to have slavery abolished.

The Republican party--frankly sectional and going into power on the
single issue of opposition to the extension of slavery--was forced by
the secession movement to take up the task of preserving the Union by
war. Consequently, the party developed new principles, welcomed the aid
of the War Democrats, and found it advisable to drop its name and with
its allies to form the Union or National Union party. It was this
National Union party which in 1864 nominated Abraham Lincoln, a
Republican, and Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, on the same ticket.
Lincoln's second Cabinet was composed of both Republicans and War
Democrats. When the war ended, the conservative leaders were anxious to
hold the Union party together in order to be in a better position to
settle the problems of reconstruction, but the movement of the War
Democrats back to their old party tended to leave in the Union party
only its Republican members, with the radical leaders dominating.

In the South the pressure of war so united the people that party
divisions disappeared for a time, but the causes of division continued
to exist and two parties, at least, would have developed had the
pressure been removed. Though all factions supported the war after it
began, the former Whigs and Douglas Democrats, when it was over, liked
to remember that they had been "Union" men in 1860 and expected to
organize in opposition to the extreme Democrats, who were now charged
with being responsible for the misfortunes of the South. They were in a
position to affiliate with the National Union party of the North if
proper inducements were offered, while the regular Democrats were ready
to rejoin their old party. But the embittered feelings resulting from
the murder of Lincoln and the rapid development of the struggle between
President Johnson and Congress caused the radicals "to lump the old
Union Democrats and Whigs together with the secessionists--and many were
driven where they did not want to go, into temporary affiliation with
the Democratic party." Thousands went very reluctantly; the old Whigs,
indeed, were not firmly committed to the Democrats until radical
reconstruction had actually begun. Still other "loyalists" in the South
were prepared to join the Northern radicals in advocating the
disfranchisement of Confederates and in opposing the granting of
suffrage to the negroes.

The man upon whom fell the task of leading these opposing factions,
radical and conservative, along a definite line of action looking to
reunion had few qualifications for the task. Johnson was ill-educated,
narrow, and vindictive and was positive that those who did not agree
with him were dishonest. Himself a Southerner, picked up by the National
Union Convention of 1864, as Thaddeus Stevens said, from "one of those
damned rebel provinces," he loved the Union, worshiped the Constitution,
and held to the strict construction views of the State Rights Democrats.
Rising from humble beginnings, he was animated by the most intense
dislike of the "slavocracy," as he called the political aristocracy of
the South. Like many other American leaders he was proud of his humble
origin, but unlike many others he never sloughed off his backwoods
crudeness. He continually boasted of himself and vilified the
aristocrats, who in return treated him badly. His dislike of them was so
marked that Isham G. Harris, a rival politician, remarked that "if
Johnson were a snake, he would lie in the grass to bite the heels of
rich men's children." His primitive notions of punishment were evident
in 1865 when he advocated imprisonment, execution, and confiscation; but
like other reckless talkers he often said more than he meant.

When Johnson succeeded to the presidency, the feeling was nearly
universal among the radicals, according to Julian, that he would prove a
godsend to the country, for "aside from Mr. Lincoln's known policy of
tenderness to the rebels, which now so jarred upon the feelings of the
hour, his well known views on the subject of reconstruction were as
distasteful as possible to radical Republicans." Senator Wade declared
to the President: "Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there
will be no trouble now in running the Government!" To which Johnson
replied: "Treason is a crime and crime must be punished. Treason must be
made infamous and traitors must be impoverished." These words are an
index to the speeches of Johnson during 1863-65. Even his radical
friends feared that he would be too vindictive. For a few weeks he was
much inclined to the radical plans, and some of the leaders certainly
understood that he was in favor of negro suffrage, the supreme test of
radicalism. But when the excitement caused by the assassination of
Lincoln and the break-up of the Confederacy had moderated somewhat,
Johnson saw before him a task so great that his desire for violent
measures was chilled. He must disband the great armies and bring all war
work to an end; he must restore intercourse with the South, which had
been blockaded for years; he must for a time police the country, look
after the negroes, and set up a temporary civil government; and finally
he must work out a restoration of the Union. Sobered by responsibility
and by the influence of moderate advisers, he rather quickly adopted
Lincoln's policy.

Johnson at first set his face against the movements toward
reconstruction by the state governments already organized and by those
people who wished to organize new governments on Lincoln's ten per cent
plan. As soon as possible the War Department notified the Union
commanders to stop all attempts at reconstruction and to pursue and
arrest all Confederate governors and other prominent civil leaders. The
President was even anxious to arrest the military leaders who had been
paroled but was checked in this desire by General Grant's firm protest.
His cabinet advisers supported Johnson in refusing to recognize the
Southern state governments; but three of them--Seward, Welles, and
McCulloch--were influential in moderating his zeal for inflicting
punishments. Nevertheless he soon had in prison the most prominent of
the Confederate civilians and several general officers. The soldiers,
however, were sent home, trade with the South was permitted, and the
Freedmen's Bureau was rapidly extended.

Previous to this Johnson had brought himself to recognize, early in May,
the Lincoln "ten per cent" governments of Louisiana, Tennessee, and
Arkansas, and the reconstructed Alexandria government of Virginia. Thus
only seven States were left without legal governments, and to bring
those States back into the Union, Johnson inaugurated on May 29, 1865, a
plan which was like that of Lincoln but not quite so liberal. In his
Amnesty Proclamation, Johnson made a longer list of exceptions aimed
especially at the once wealthy slave owners. On the same day he
proclaimed the restoration of North Carolina. A provisional governor, W.
W. Holden, was appointed and directed to reorganize the civil government
and to call a constitutional convention elected by those who had taken
the amnesty oath. This convention was to make necessary amendments to
the constitution and to "restore said State to its constitutional
relations to the Federal Government." It is to be noted that Johnson
fixed the qualifications of delegates and of those who elected them,
but, this stage once passed, the convention or the legislature would
"prescribe the qualifications of electors ... a power the people of the
several States composing the Federal Union have rightfully exercised
from the origin of the government to the present time." The President
also directed the various cabinet officers to extend the work of their
departments over the Confederate States and ordered the army officers to
assist the civil authorities. During the next six weeks similar measures
were undertaken for the remaining six States of the Confederacy.

To set up the new order army officers were first sent into every county
to administer the amnesty oath and thus to secure a "loyal" electorate.
In each State the provisional governor organized out of the remains of
the Confederate local régime a new civil government. Confederate local
officials who could and would take the amnesty oath were directed to
resume office until relieved; the laws of 1861, except those relating to
slavery, were declared to be in force; the courts were directed to use
special efforts to crush lawlessness; and the old jury lists were
destroyed and new ones were drawn up containing only the names of those
who had taken the amnesty oath. Since there was no money in any state
treasury, small sums were now raised by license taxes. A full staff of
department heads was appointed, and by July, 1865, the provisional
governments were in fair working order.

To the constitutional conventions, which met in the fall, it was made
clear, through the governors, that the President would insist upon three
conditions: the formal abolition of slavery, the repudiation of the
ordinance of secession, and the repudiation of the Confederate war debt.
To Governor Holden he telegraphed: "Every dollar of the debt created to
aid the rebellion against the United States should be repudiated finally
and forever. The great mass of the people should not be taxed to pay a
debt to aid in carrying on a rebellion which they in fact, if left to
themselves, were opposed to. Let those who had given their means for the
obligations of the state look to that power they tried to establish in
violation of law, constitution, and will of the people. They must meet
their fate." With little opposition these conditions were fulfilled,
though there was a strong feeling against the repudiation of the debt,
much discussion as to whether the ordinance of secession should be
"repealed" or declared "now and always null and void," and some
quibbling as to whether slavery was being destroyed by state action or
had already been destroyed by war.

In the old state constitutions, very slight changes were made. Of these
the chief were concerned with the abolition of slavery and the
arrangement of representation and direct taxation on the basis of white
population. Little effort was made to settle any of the negro problems,
and in all States the conventions left it to the legislatures to make
laws for the freedmen. There was no discussion of negro suffrage in the
conventions, but President Johnson sent what was for him a remarkable
communication to Governor Sharkey of Mississippi:

If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who
can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write
their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at
not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, you
would completely disarm the adversary and set an example the other
States will follow. This you can do with perfect safety, and you would
thus place Southern States in reference to free persons of color upon
the same basis with the free States.... And as a consequence the
radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled
in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their
relations to the Union by not accepting their senators and
representatives.

In deciding upon a basis of representation it was clear that the
majority of delegates desired to lessen the influence of the Black Belt
and place the control of the government with the "up country." In the
Alabama convention Robert M. Patton, then a delegate and later governor,
frankly avowed this object, and in South Carolina Governor Perry urged
the convention to give no consideration to negro suffrage, "because this
is a white man's government," and if the negroes should vote they would
be controlled by a few whites. A kindly disposition toward the negroes
was general except on the part of extreme Unionists, who opposed any
favors to the race. "This is a white man's country" was a doctrine to
which all the conventions subscribed.

The conventions held brief sessions, completed their work, and
adjourned, after directing that elections be held for state and local
officers and for members of Congress. Before December the appointed
local officials had been succeeded by elected officers; members of
Congress were on their way to Washington; the state legislatures were
assembling or already in session; and the elected governors were ready
to take office. It was understood that as soon as enough state
legislatures ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to make it a part of the
Constitution, the President would permit the transfer of authority to
the new governors. The Legislature of Mississippi alone was recalcitrant
about the amendment, and before January, 1866, the elected officials
were everywhere installed except in Texas, where the work was not
completed until March. When Congress met in December, 1865, the
President reported that all former Confederate States except Texas were
ready to be readmitted. Congress, however, refused to admit their
senators and representatives, and thus began the struggle which ended
over a year later with the victory of the radicals and the undoing of
the work of the two Presidents.

The plan of the Presidents was at best only imperfectly realized. It was
found impossible to reorganize the Federal Administration in the South
with men who could subscribe to the "ironclad oath," for nearly all who
were competent to hold office had favored or aided the Confederacy. It
was two years before more than a third of the post offices could be
opened. The other Federal departments were in similar difficulties, and
at last women and "carpetbaggers" were appointed. The Freedmen's Bureau,
which had been established coincidently with the provisional
governments, assumed jurisdiction over the negroes, while the army
authorities very early took the position that any man who claimed to be
a Unionist should not be tried in the local courts but must be given a
better chance in a provost court. Thus a third or more of the population
was withdrawn from the control of the state government. In several
States the head of the Bureau made arrangements for local magistrates
and officials to act as Bureau officials, and in such cases the two
authorities acted in coöperation. The army of occupation, too, exerted
an authority which not infrequently interfered with the workings of the
new state government. Nearly everywhere there was a lack of certainty
and efficiency due to the concurrent and sometimes conflicting
jurisdictions of state government, army commanders, Bureau authorities,
and even the President acting upon or through any of the others.

The standing of the Southern state organizations was in doubt after the
refusal of Congress to recognize them. Nevertheless, in spite of this
uncertainty they continued to function as States during the year of
controversy which followed; the courts were opened and steadily grew in
influence; here and there militia and patrols were reorganized;
officials who refused to "accept the situation" were dismissed;
elections were held; the legislatures revised the laws to fit new
conditions and enacted new laws for the emancipated blacks. To all this
progress in reorganization the action of Congress was a severe blow,
since it gave notice that none of the problems of reconstruction were
yet solved. An increasing spirit of irritation and independence was
observed throughout the States in question, and at the elections the
former Confederates gained more and more offices. The year was marked in
the South by the tendency toward the formation of parties, by the
development of the "Southern outrages" issue, by an attempt to frustrate
radical action, and finally by a line-up of the great mass of the whites
in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment and other radical plans of
Congress.

The Joint Committee on Reconstruction, appointed when Congress refused
to accept the work of President Johnson, proceeded during several months
to take testimony and to consider measures. The testimony, which was
taken chiefly to support opinions already formed, appeared to prove that
the negroes and the Unionists were so badly treated that the Freedmen's
Bureau and the army must be kept in the South to protect them; that free
negro labor was a success but that the whites were hostile to it; that
the whites were disloyal and would, if given control of the Southern
governments and admitted to Congress, constitute a danger to the nation
and especially to the party in power.

To convince the voters of the North of the necessity of dealing
drastically with the South a campaign of misrepresentation was begun in
the summer of 1865, which became more and more systematic and
unscrupulous as the political struggle at Washington grew fiercer.
Newspapers regularly ran columns headed "Southern Outrages" and every
conceivable mistreatment of blacks by whites was represented as taking
place on a large scale. As General Richard Taylor said, it would seem
that about 1866 every white man, woman, and child in the South began
killing and maltreating negroes. In truth, there was less and less
ground for objection to the treatment of the blacks as time went on and
as the several agencies of government secured firmer control over the
lawless elements. But fortunately for the radicals their contention
seemed to be established by riots on a large scale in Memphis and New
Orleans where negroes were killed and injured in much greater number
than whites.

The rapid development of the radical plans of Congress checked the
tendency toward political division in the South. Only a small party of
rabid Unionists would now affiliate with the radicals, while all the
others reluctantly held together, endorsed Johnson's policy, and
attempted to affiliate with the disintegrating National Union party. But
the defeat of the President's policies in the elections of 1866, the
increasing radicalism of Congress as shown by the Civil Rights Act, the
expansion of the Freedmen's Bureau, the report of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction, and the proposal of the Fourteenth Amendment led
farsighted Southerners to see that the President was likely to lose in
his fight with Congress.

Now began, in the latter half of 1866, with some coöperation in the
North and probably with the approval of the President, a movement in the
South to forestall the radicals by means of a settlement which, although
less severe than the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, might yet be
acceptable to Congress. One feature of the settlement was to be some
form of negro suffrage, either by local action or by constitutional
amendment. Those behind this scheme were mainly of the former governing
class. Negro suffrage, they thought, would take the wind out of the
radical sails, the Southern whites would soon be able to control the
blacks, representation in Congress would be increased, and the Black
Belt would perhaps regain its former political hegemony. It is hardly
necessary to say that the majority of the whites were solidly opposed to
such a measure. But it was hoped to carry it under pressure through the
Legislature or to bring it about indirectly through rulings of the
Freedmen's Bureau.

Coincident with this scheme of partial negro suffrage an attempt was
made by the conservative leaders in Washington, working with the
Southerners, to propose a revised Fourteenth Amendment which would give
the vote to competent negroes and not disfranchise the whites. A
conference of Southern governors met in Washington early in 1867 and
drafted such an amendment. But it was too late.

Meanwhile the Fourteenth Amendment submitted by Congress had been
brought before the Southern legislatures and during the winter of
1866-67 it was rejected by all of them. There was strong opposition to
it because it disfranchised the leading whites, but perhaps the
principal reason for its rejection was that the Southern people were not
sure that still more severe conditions might not be imposed later.

While the President was "restoring" the States which had seceded and
struggling with Congress, the Border States of the South, including
Tennessee (which was admitted in 1866 by reason of its radical state
government), were also in the throes of reconstruction. Though there was
less military interference in these than in the other States, many of
the problems were similar. All had the Freedmen's Bureau, the negro
race, the Unionists, and the Confederates; in every State, except
Kentucky, Confederates were persecuted, the minority was in control, and
"ring" rule was the order of the day; but in each State there were signs
of the political revolution which a few years later was to put the
radicals out of power.

The executive plan for the restoration of the Union, begun by Lincoln
and adopted by Johnson, was, as we have seen, at first applied in all
the States which had seceded. A military governor was appointed in each
State by the President by virtue of his authority as commander in chief.
This official, aided by a civilian staff of his own choice and supported
by the United States army and other Federal agencies, reorganized the
state administration and after a few months turned the state and local
governments over to regularly elected officials. Restoration should now
have been completed, but Congress refused to admit the senators and
representatives of these States, and entered upon a fifteen months'
struggle with the President over details of the methods of the
reconstruction. Meanwhile the Southern States, though unrepresented in
Congress, continued their activities, with some interference from
Federal authorities, until Congress in 1867 declared their governments
non-existent.

The work begun by Lincoln and Johnson deserved better success. The
original plan restored to political rights only a small number of
Unionists, the lukewarm Confederates, and the unimportant. But in spite
of the threatening speeches of Johnson he used his power of pardon until
none except the most prominent leaders were excluded. The personnel of
the Johnson governments was fair. The officials were, in the main,
former Douglas Democrats and Whigs, respectable and conservative, but
not admired or loved by the people. The conventions and the legislatures
were orderly and dignified and manifested a desire to accept the
situation.

There were no political parties at first, but material for several
existed. If things had been allowed to take their course there would
have arisen a normal cleavage between former Whigs and Democrats,
between the up-country and the low country, between the slaveholders and
the nonslaveholders. The average white man in these governments was
willing to be fair to the negro but was not greatly concerned about his
future. In the view of most white people it was the white man who was
emancipated. The white districts had no desire to let the power return
to the Black Belt by giving the negro the ballot, for the vote of the
negroes, they believed, would be controlled by their former masters.

Johnson's adoption of Lincoln's plan gave notice to all that the
radicals had failed to control him. He and they had little in common;
they wished to uproot a civilization, while he wished to punish
individuals; they were not troubled by constitutional scruples, while he
was the strictest of State Rights Democrats; they thought principally of
the negro and his potentialities, while Johnson was thinking of the
emancipated white man. It is possible that Lincoln might have succeeded,
but for Johnson the task proved too great.




CHAPTER IV.

The Wards of the Nation

The negroes at the close of the war were not slaves or serfs, nor were
they citizens. What was to be done with them and for them? The Southern
answer to this question may be found in the so-called "Black Laws,"
which were enacted by the state governments set up by President Johnson.
The views of the dominant North may be discerned in part in the
organization and administration of the Freedmen's Bureau. The two
sections saw the same problem from different angles and their proposed
solutions were of necessity opposed in principle and in practice.

The South desired to fit the emancipated negro race into the new social
order by frankly recognizing his inferiority to the whites. In some
things racial separation was unavoidable. New legislation consequently
must be enacted, because the slave codes were obsolete; because the old
laws made for the small free negro class did not meet present
conditions; and because the emancipated blacks could not be brought
conveniently and at once under laws originally devised for a white
population. The new laws must meet many needs; family life, morals, and
conduct must be regulated; the former slave must be given a status in
court in order that he might be protected in person and property; the
old, the infirm, and the orphans must be cared for; the white race must
be protected from lawless blacks and the blacks from unscrupulous and
violent whites; the negro must have an opportunity for education; and
the roving blacks must be forced to get homes, settle down, and go to
work.

Pending such legislation the affairs of the negro remained in control of
the unpopular Freedmen's Bureau--a "system of espionage," as Judge
Clayton of Alabama called it, and, according to Governor Humphreys of
Mississippi, "a hideous curse" under which white men were persecuted and
pillaged. Judge Memminger of South Carolina, in a letter to President
Johnson, emphasized the fact that the whites of England and the United
States gained civil and political rights through centuries of slow
advancement and that they were far ahead of the people of European
states. Consequently, it would be a mistake to give the freedmen a
status equal to that of the most advanced whites. Rather, let the United
States profit by the experience of the British in their emancipation
policies and arrange a system of apprenticeship for a period of
transition. When the negro should be fit, let him be advanced to
citizenship.

Most Southern leaders agreed that the removal of the master's protection
was a real loss to the negro which must be made good to some extent by
giving the negro a status in court and by accepting negro testimony in
all cases in which blacks were concerned. The North Carolina committee
on laws for freedmen agreed with objectors that "there are comparatively
few of the slaves lately freed who are honest" and truthful, but
maintained that the negroes were capable of improvement. The chief
executives of Mississippi and Florida declared that there was no danger
to the whites in admitting the more or less unreliable negro testimony,
for the courts and juries would in every case arrive at a proper
valuation of it. Governors Marvin of Florida and Humphreys of
Mississippi advocated practical civil equality, while in North Carolina
and several other States there was a disposition to admit negro
testimony only in cases in which negroes were concerned. The North
Carolina committee recommended the abolition of whipping as a punishment
unfit for free people, and most States accepted this principle. Even in
1865 the general disposition was to make uniform laws for both races,
except in regard to violation of contracts, immoral conduct, vagrancy,
marriage, schools, and forms of punishment. In some of these matters the
whites were to be more strictly regulated; in others, the negroes.

There was further general agreement that in economic relations both
races must be protected, each from the other; but it is plain that the
leaders believed that the negro had less at stake than the white. The
negro was disposed to be indolent; he knew little of the obligations of
contracts; he was not honest; and he would leave his job at will.
Consequently Memminger recommended apprenticeship for all negroes;
Governor Marvin suggested it for children alone; and others wished it
provided for orphans only. Further, the laws enacted must force the
negroes to settle down, to work, and to hold to contracts. Memminger
showed that, without legislation to enforce contracts and to secure
eviction of those who refused to work, the white planter in the South
was wholly at the mercy of the negro. The plantations were scattered,
the laborers' houses were already occupied, and there was no labor
market to which a planter could go if the laborers deserted his fields.

What would the negro become if these leaders of reconstruction were to
have their way? Something better than a serf, something less than a
citizen--a second degree citizen, perhaps, with legal rights about equal
to those of white women and children. Governor Marvin hoped to make of
the race a good agricultural peasantry; his successor was anxious that
the blacks should be preferred to European immigrants; others agreed
with Memminger that after training and education he might be advanced to
full citizenship.

These opinions are representative of those held by the men who,
Memminger excepted, were placed in charge of affairs by President
Johnson and who were not specially in sympathy with the negroes or with
the planters but rather with the average white. All believed that
emancipation was a mistake, but all agreed that "it is not the negro's
fault" and gave no evidence of a disposition to perpetuate slavery under
another name.

The legislation finally framed showed in its discriminatory features the
combined influence of the old laws for free negroes, the vagrancy laws
of North and South for whites, the customs of slavery times, the British
West Indies legislation for ex-slaves, and the regulations of the United
States War and Treasury Departments and of the Freedmen's Bureau--all
modified and elaborated by the Southern whites. In only two States,
Mississippi and South Carolina, did the legislation bulk large in
quantity; in other States discriminating laws were few; in still other
States none were passed except those defining race and prohibiting
intermarriage.

In all of the state laws there were certain common characteristics,
among which were the following: the descendant of a negro was to be
classed as a negro through the third generation, ¹ even though one
parent in each generation was white; intermarriage of the races was
prohibited; existing slave marriages were declared valid and for the
future marriage was generally made easier for the blacks than for the
whites. In all States the negro was given his day in court, and in cases
relating to negroes his testimony was accepted; in six States he might
testify in any case. When provision was made for schooling, the rule of
race separation was enforced. In Mississippi the "Jim Crow car," or
separate car for negroes, was invented. In several States the negro had
to have a license to carry weapons, to preach, or to engage in trade. In
Mississippi, a negro could own land only in town; in other States he
could purchase land only in the country. Why the difference, no one
knows and probably few knew at the time. Some of the legislation was
undoubtedly hasty and ill-considered.

¹ Fourth in Tennessee.

But the laws relating to apprenticeship, vagrancy, and enforced punitive
employment turned out to be of greater practical importance. On these
subjects the legislation of Mississippi and South Carolina was the most
extreme. In Mississippi negro orphans were to be bound out, preferably
to a former master, if "he or she shall be a suitable person." The
master was given the usual control over apprentices and was bound by the
usual duties, including that of teaching the apprentice. But the
penalties for "enticing away" apprentices were severe. The South
Carolina statute was not essentially different. The vagrancy laws of
these two States were in the main the same for both races, but in
Mississippi the definition of vagrancy was enlarged to include negroes
not at work, those "found unlawfully assembling themselves together,"
and "all white persons assembling themselves with freedmen." It is to be
noted that nearly all punishment for petty offenses took the form of
hiring out, preferably to the former master or employer. The principal
petty offenses were, it would seem, vagrancy and "enticing away"
laborers or apprentices. The South Carolina statute contains some other
interesting provisions. A negro, man or woman, who had enjoyed the
companionship of two or more spouses, must by April 1, 1866, select one
of them as a permanent partner; a farm laborer must "rise at dawn," feed
the animals, care for the property, be quiet and orderly, and "retire at
reasonable hours"; on Sunday the servants must take turns in doing the
necessary work, and they must be respectful and civil to the "master and
his family, guests, and agents"; to engage in skilled labor the negro
must obtain a license. Whipping and the pillory were permitted in
Florida for certain offenses, and in South Carolina the master might
"moderately correct" servants under eighteen years of age. Other
punishments were generally the same for both races, except the hiring
out for petty offenses.

From the Southern point of view none of this legislation was regarded as
a restriction of negro rights but as a wide extension to the negro of
rights never before possessed, an adaptation of the white man's laws to
his peculiar case. It is doubtful whether in some of the States the
authorities believed that there were any discriminatory laws; they
probably overlooked some of the free negro legislation already on the
statute books. In Alabama, for example, General Wager Swayne, the head
of the Freedmen's Bureau, reported that all such laws had either been
dropped by the legislature or had been vetoed by the governor. Yet the
statute books do show some discriminations. There is a marked difference
between earlier and later legislation. The more stringent laws were
enacted before the end of 1865. After New Year's Day had passed and the
negroes had begun to settle down, the legislatures either passed mild
laws or abandoned all special legislation for the negroes. Later in
1866, several States repealed the legislation of 1865.

In so far as the "Black Laws" discriminated against the negro they were
never enforced but were suspended from the beginning by the army and the
Freedmen's Bureau. They had, however, a very important effect upon that
section of Northern opinion which was already suspicious of the good
faith of the Southerners. They were part of a plan, some believed, to
reënslave the negro or at least to create by law a class of serfs. This
belief did much to bring about later radical legislation.

If the "Black Laws" represented the reaction of the Southern
legislatures to racial conditions, the Freedmen's Bureau was the
corresponding result of the interest taken by the North in the welfare
of the negro. It was established just as the war was closing and arose
out of the various attempts to meet the negro problems that arose during
the war. The Bureau had always a dual nature, due in part to its
inheritance of regulations, precedents, and traditions from the various
attempts made during war time to handle the many thousands of negroes
who came under Federal control, and in part to the humanitarian impulses
of 1865, born of a belief in the capacity of the negro for freedom and a
suspicion that the Southern whites intended to keep as much of slavery
as they could. The officials of the Bureau likewise were of two classes:
those in control were for the most part army officers, standing as
arbiters between white and black, usually just and seldom the victims of
their sympathies; but the mass of less responsible officials were men of
inferior ability and character, either blind partisans of the negro or
corrupt and subject to purchase by the whites.

In view of the fact that the Freedmen's Bureau was considered a new
institution in 1865, it is rather remarkable how closely it followed in
organization, purpose, and methods the precedents set during the war by
the officers of the army and the Treasury. In Virginia, General Butler,
in 1861, declared escaped slaves to be "contraband" and proceeded to
organize them into communities for discipline, work, food, and care. His
successors in Virginia and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands
of Georgia and South Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor
system with fixed wages, hours, and methods of work, and everywhere made
use of the captured or abandoned property of the Confederates. In
Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain John Eaton of Grant's army employed
thousands in a modified free labor system; and further down in
Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and Banks also put
large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for the
Government. Everywhere, as the numbers of negroes increased, the army
commanders divided the occupied negro regions into districts under
superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, coöperated with
benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the
blacks, and developed systems of government for them.

The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the
confiscation laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then
as an employer of negro labor on abandoned plantations. Either alone or
in coöperation with the army and charitable associations, it even
supervised negro colonies, and sometimes it assumed practically complete
control of the economic welfare of the negro. This Department introduced
in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade system. The negro was regarded as
"the ward of the nation," but he was told impressively that "labor is a
public duty and idleness and vagrancy a crime." All wanted him to work:
the Treasury wanted cotton and other crops to sell; the lessees and
speculators wanted to make fortunes by his labor; and the army wanted to
be free from the burden of the idle blacks. In spite of all these
ministrations the negroes suffered much from harsh treatment, neglect,
and unsanitary conditions.

During 1863 and 1864 several influences were urging the establishment of
a national bureau or department to take charge of matters relating to
the African race. Some wished to establish on the borders of the South a
paid labor system, which might later be extended over the entire region,
to get more slaves out of the Confederacy into this free labor
territory, and to prevent immigration of negroes into the North, which,
after the Emancipation Proclamation, was apprehensive of this danger.
Others wished to relieve the army and the treasury officials of the
burden of caring for the blacks and to protect the latter from the
"northern harpies and bloodhounds" who had fastened upon them the lessee
system.

The discussion lasted for two years. The Freedmen's Inquiry Commission,
after a survey of the field in 1863, recommended a consolidation of all
efforts under an organization which should perpetuate the best features
of the old system. But there was much opposition to this plan in
Congress. The negroes would be exploited, objected some; the scheme gave
too much power to the proposed organization, said others; another
objection was urged against the employment of a horde of incompetent and
unscrupulous officeholders, for "the men who go down there and become
your overseers and negro drivers will be your brokendown politicians and
your dilapidated preachers, that description of men who are too lazy to
work and just a little too honest to steal."

As the war drew to a close the advocates of a policy of consolidation in
negro affairs prevailed, and on March 3, 1865, an act was approved
creating in the War Department a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands. This Bureau was to continue for one year after the
close of the war and it was to control all matters relating to freedmen
and refugees, that is, Unionists who had been driven out of the South.
Food, shelter, and clothing were to be given to the needy, and abandoned
or confiscated property was to be used for or leased to freedmen. At the
head of the Bureau was to be a commissioner with an assistant
commissioner for each of the Southern States. These officials and other
employees must take the "ironclad" oath.

It was planned that the Bureau should have a brief existence, but the
institution and its wards became such important factors in politics that
on July 16, 1866, after a struggle with the President, Congress passed
an act over his veto amplifying the powers of the Bureau and extending
it for two years longer. This continuation of the Bureau was due to many
things: to a belief that former slaveholders were not to be trusted in
dealing with the negroes; to the baneful effect of the "Black Laws" upon
Northern public opinion; to the struggle between the President and
Congress over reconstruction; and to the foresight of radical
politicians who saw in the institution an instrument for the political
instruction of the blacks in the proper doctrines.

The new law was supplementary to the Act of 1865, but its additional
provisions merely endorsed what the Bureau was already doing. It
authorized the issue of medical supplies, confirmed certain sales of
land to negroes, and provided that the promises which Sherman made in
1865 to the Sea Island negroes should be carried out as far as possible
and that no lands occupied by blacks should be restored to the owners
until the crops of 1866 were gathered; it directed the Bureau to
coöperate with private charitable and benevolent associations, and it
authorized the use or sale for school purposes of all confiscated
property; and finally it ordered that the civil equality of the negro be
upheld by the Bureau and its courts when state courts refused to accept
the principle. By later laws the existence of the Bureau was extended to
January 1, 1869, in the unreconstructed States, but its educational and
financial activities were continued until June 20, 1872.

The chief objections to the Bureau from the conservative Northern point
of view were summed up in the President's veto messages. The laws
creating it were based, he asserted, on the theory that a state of war
still existed; there was too great a concentration of power in the hands
of a few individuals who could not be held responsible; with such a
large number of agents ignorant of the country and often working for
their own advantage injustice would inevitably result; in spite of the
fact that the negro everywhere had a status in court, arbitrary
tribunals were established, without jury, without regular procedure or
rules of evidence, and without appeal; the provisions in regard to
abandoned lands amounted to confiscation without a hearing; the negro,
who must in the end work out his own salvation, and who was protected by
the demand for his labor, would be deluded into thinking his future
secure without further effort on his part; although nominally under the
War Department, the Bureau was not subject to military control; it was
practically a great political machine; and, finally, the States most
concerned were not represented in Congress.

The Bureau was soon organized in all the former slaveholding States
except Delaware, with general headquarters in Washington and state
headquarters at the various capitals. General O. O. Howard, who was
appointed commissioner, was a good officer, soft-hearted, honest, pious,
and frequently referred to as "the Christian soldier." He was
fair-minded and not disposed to irritate the Southern whites
unnecessarily, but he was rather suspicious of their intentions toward
the negroes, and he was a believer in the righteousness of the
Freedmen's Bureau. He was not a good business man; and he was not beyond
the reach of politicians. At one time he was seriously disturbed in his
duties by the buzzing of the presidential bee in his bonnet. The members
of his staff were not of his moral stature, and several of them were
connected with commercial and political enterprises which left their
motives open to criticism.

The assistant commissioners were, as a rule, general officers of the
army, though a few were colonels and chaplains. ¹ Nearly half of them
had during the war been associated with the various attempts to handle
the negro problem, and it was these men who shaped the organization of
the Bureau. While few of them were immediately acceptable to the
Southern whites, only ten of them proved seriously objectionable on
account of personality, character, or politics. Among the most able
should be mentioned Generals Schofield, Swayne, Fullerton, Steedman, and
Fessenden, and Colonel John Eaton. The President had little or no
control over the appointment or discipline of the officials and agents
of the Bureau, except possibly by calling some of the higher army
officers back to military service.

¹ They numbered eleven at first and fourteen after July, 1866, and were
changed so often that fifty, in all, served in this rank before January
1, 1869, when the Bureau was practically discontinued.

As a result of General Grant's severe criticism of the arrangement which
removed the Bureau from control by the military establishment, the
military commander was in a few instances also appointed assistant
commissioner. Each assistant commissioner was aided by a headquarters
staff and had under his jurisdiction in each State various district,
county, and local agents, with a special corps of school officials, who
were usually teachers and missionaries belonging to religious and
charitable societies. The local agents were recruited from the members
of the Veteran Reserve Corps, the subordinate officers and
non-commissioned officers of the army, mustered-out soldiers, officers
of negro troops, preachers, teachers, and Northern civilians who had
come South. As a class these agents were not competent persons to guide
the blacks in the ways of liberty or to arbitrate differences between
the races. There were many exceptions, but the Southern view as
expressed by General Wade Hampton had only too much foundation: "There
may be," he said, "an honest man connected with the Bureau." John Minor
Botts, a Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union, asserted that
many of the agents were good men who did good work but that trouble
resulted from the ignorance and fanaticism of others. The minority
members of the Ku Klux Committee condemned the agents as being
"generally of a class of fanatics without character or responsibility."

The chief activities of the Bureau included the following five branches:
relief work for both races; the regulation of negro labor; the
administration of justice in cases concerning negroes; the management of
abandoned and confiscated property; and the support of schools for the
negroes.

The relief work which was carried on for more than four years consisted
of caring for sick negroes who were within reach of the hospitals,
furnishing food and sometimes clothing and shelter to destitute blacks
and whites, and transporting refugees of both races back to their homes.
Nearly a hundred hospitals and clinics were established, and half a
million patients were treated. This work was greatly needed, especially
for the old and the infirm, and it was well done. The transportation of
refugees did not reach large proportions, and after 1866 it was
entangled in politics. But the issue of supplies in huge quantities
brought much needed relief though at the same time a certain amount of
demoralization. The Bureau claimed little credit, and is usually given
none, for keeping alive during the fall and winter of 1865-1866
thousands of destitute whites. Yet more than a third of the food issued
was to whites, and without it many would have starved. Numerous
Confederate soldiers on the way home after the surrender were fed by the
Bureau, and in the destitute white districts a great deal of suffering
was relieved and prevented by its operations. The negroes, dwelling for
the most part in regions where labor was in demand, needed relief for a
shorter time, but they were attracted in numbers to the towns by free
food, and it was difficult to get them back to work. The political value
of the free food issues was not generally recognized until later in 1866
and in 1867.

During the first year of the Bureau an important duty of the agents was
the supervision of negro labor and the fixing of wages. Both officials
and planters generally demanded that contracts be written, approved, and
filed in the office of the Bureau. They thought that the negroes would
work better if they were thus bound by contracts. The agents usually
required that the agreements between employer and laborer cover such
points as the nature of the work, the hours, food and clothes, medical
attendance, shelter, and wages. To make wages secure, the laborer was
given a lien on the crop; to secure the planter from loss, unpaid wages
might be forfeited if the laborer failed to keep his part of the
contract. When it dawned upon the Bureau authorities that other systems
of labor had been or might be developed in the South, they permitted
arrangements for the various forms of cash and share renting. But it was
everywhere forbidden to place the negroes under "overseers" or to
subject them to "unwilling apprenticeship" and "compulsory working out
of debts."

The written contract system for laborers did not work out successfully.
The negroes at first were expecting quite other fruits of freedom. One
Mississippi negro voiced what was doubtless the opinion of many when he
declared that he "considered no man free who had to work for a living."
Few negroes would contract for more than three months and none for a
period beyond January 1, 1866, when they expected a division of lands
among the ex-slaves. In spite of the regulations, most worked on oral
agreements. In 1866 nearly all employers threw overboard the written
contract system for labor and permitted oral agreements. Some States had
passed stringent laws for the enforcing of contracts, but in Alabama,
Governor Patton vetoed such legislation on the ground that it was not
needed. General Swayne, the Bureau chief for the State, endorsed the
Governor's action and stated that the negro was protected by his freedom
to leave when mistreated, and the planter, by the need on the part of
the negro for food and shelter. Negroes, he said, were afraid of
contracts and, besides, contracts led to litigation.

In order to safeguard the civil rights of the negroes the Bureau was
given authority to establish courts of its own and to supervise the
action of state courts in cases to which freedmen were parties. The
majority of the assistant commissioners made no attempt to let the state
courts handle negro cases but were accustomed to bring all such cases
before the Bureau or the provost courts of the army. In Alabama, quite
early, and later in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia, the wiser
assistant commissioners arranged for the state courts to handle
freedmen's cases with the understanding that discriminating laws were to
be suspended. General Swayne in so doing declared that he was "unwilling
to establish throughout Alabama courts conducted by persons foreign to
her citizenship and strangers to her laws." The Bureau courts were
informal affairs, consisting usually of one or two administrative
officers. There were no jury, no appeal beyond the assistant
commissioner, no rules of procedure, and no accepted body of law. In
state courts accepted by the Bureau the proceedings in negro cases were
conducted in the same manner as for the whites.

The educational work of the Bureau was at first confined to coöperation
with such Northern religious and benevolent societies as were organizing
schools and churches for the negroes. After the first year the Bureau
extended financial aid and undertook a system of supervision over negro
schools. The teachers employed were Northern whites and negroes in about
equal numbers. Confiscated Confederate property was devoted to negro
education, and in several States the assistant commissioners collected
fees and percentages of the negroes' wages for the benefit of the
schools. In addition the Bureau expended about six million dollars.

The intense dislike which the Southern whites manifested for the
Freedmen's Bureau was due in general to their resentment of outside
control of domestic affairs and in particular to unavoidable
difficulties inherent in the situation. Among the concrete causes of
Southern hostility was the attitude of some of the higher officials and
many of the lower ones toward the white people. They assumed that the
whites were unwilling to accord fair treatment to the blacks in the
matter of wages, schools, and justice. An official in Louisiana declared
that the whites would exterminate the negroes if the Bureau were
removed. A few months later General Fullerton in the same State reported
that trouble was caused by those agents who noisily demanded special
privileges for the negro but who objected to any penalties for his
lawlessness and made of the negroes a pampered class. General Tillson in
Georgia predicted the extinction of the "old time Southerner with his
hate, cruelty, and malice." General Fisk declared that "there are some
of the meanest, unsubjugated and unreconstructed rascally revolutionists
in Kentucky that curse the soil of the country ... a more select number
of vindictive, pro-slavery, rebellious legislators cannot be found than
a majority of the Kentucky legislature." There was a disposition to
lecture the whites about their sins in regard to slavery and to point
out to them how far in their general ignorance and backwardness they
fell short of enlightened people.

The Bureau courts were frequently conducted in an "illegal and
oppressive manner," with "decided partiality for the colored people,
without regard to justice." For this reason they were suspended for a
time in Louisiana and Georgia by General Steedman and General Fullerton,
and cases were then sent before military courts. Men of the highest
character were dragged before the Bureau tribunals upon frivolous
complaints, were lectured, abused, ridiculed, and arbitrarily fined or
otherwise punished. The jurisdiction of the Bureau courts weakened the
civil courts and their frequent interference in trivial matters was not
conducive to a return to normal conditions.

The inferior agents, not sufficiently under the control of their
superiors, were responsible for a great deal of this bad feeling. Many
of them held radical opinions as to the relations of the races, and
inculcated these views in their courts, in the schools, and in the new
negro churches. Some were charged with even causing strikes and other
difficulties in order to be bought off by the whites. The tendency of
their work was to create in the negroes a pervasive distrust of the
whites.

The prevalent delusion in regard to an impending division of the lands
among the blacks had its origin in the operation of the war-time
confiscation laws, in some of the Bureau legislation, and in General
Sherman's Sea Island order, but it was further fostered by the agents
until most blacks firmly believed that each head of a family was to get
"40 acres and a mule." This belief seriously interfered with industry
and resulted also in widespread swindling by rascals who for years made
a practice of selling fraudulent deeds to land with red, white, and blue
sticks to mark off the bounds of a chosen spot on the former master's
plantation. The assistant commissioners labored hard to disabuse the
minds of the negroes, but their efforts were often neutralized by the
unscrupulous attitude of the agents.

As the contest over reconstruction developed in Washington, the
officials of the Bureau soon recognized the political possibilities of
their institution. After mid-year of 1866, the Bureau became a political
machine for the purpose of organizing the blacks into the Union League,
where the rank and file were taught that reënslavement would follow
Democratic victories. Nearly all of the Bureau agents aided in the
administration of the reconstruction acts in 1867 and in the
organization of the new state and local governments and became officials
under the new régime. They were the chief agents in capturing the solid
negro vote for the Republican party.

Neither of the two plans for guiding the freedmen into a place in the
social order--the "Black Laws" and the Freedmen's Bureau--was
successful. The former contained a program which was better suited to
actual conditions and which might have succeeded if it had been given a
fair trial. These laws were a measure of the extent to which the average
white would then go in "accepting the situation" so far as the blacks
were concerned. And on the whole the recognition of negro rights made in
these laws, and made at a time when the whites believed that they were
free to handle the situation, was remarkably fair. The negroes lately
released from slavery were admitted to the enjoyment of the same rights
as the whites as to legal protection of life, liberty, and property, as
to education and as to the family relation, limited only by the clear
recognition of the principles of political inferiority and social
separation. Unhappily this legislation was not put to the test of
practical experience because of the Freedmen's Bureau; it was
nevertheless skillfully used to arouse the dominant Northern party to a
course of action which made impossible any further effort to treat the
race problem with due consideration to actual local conditions.

Much of the work of the Freedmen's Bureau was of only temporary benefit
to both races. The results of its more permanent work were not generally
good. The institution was based upon the assumption that the negro race
must be protected from the white race. In its organization and
administration it was an impossible combination of the practical and the
theoretical, of opportunism and humanitarianism, of common sense and
idealism. It failed to exert a permanently wholesome influence because
its lesser agents were not held to strict accountability by their
superiors. Under these agents the alienation of the two races began, and
the ill feelings then aroused were destined to persist into a long and
troubled future.




CHAPTER V.

The Victory of the Radicals

The soldiers who fought through the war to victory or to defeat had been
at home nearly two years before the radicals developed sufficient
strength to carry through their plans for a revolutionary reconstruction
of the Southern States. At the end of the war a majority of the Northern
people would have supported a settlement in accordance with Lincoln's
policy. Eight months later a majority, but a smaller one, would have
supported Johnson's work had it been possible to secure a popular
decision on it. How then did the radicals gain the victory over the
conservatives? The answer to this question is given by James Ford Rhodes
in terms of personalities: "Three men are responsible for the
Congressional policy of Reconstruction: Andrew Johnson, by his obstinacy
and bad behavior; Thaddeus Stevens, by his vindictiveness and
parliamentary tyranny; Charles Sumner, by his pertinacity in a misguided
humanitarianism." The President stood alone in his responsibility, but
his chief opponents were the ablest leaders of a resolute band of
radicals.

Radicalism did not begin in the Administration of Andrew Johnson.
Lincoln had felt its covert opposition throughout the war, but he
possessed the faculty of weakening his opponents, while Johnson's
conduct usually multiplied the number and the strength of his enemies.
At first the radicals criticized Lincoln's policy in regard to slavery,
and after the Emancipation Proclamation they shifted their attack to his
"ten per cent" plan for organizing the state governments as outlined in
the Proclamation of December, 1863. Lincoln's course was distasteful to
them because he did not admit the right of Congress to dictate terms,
because of his liberal attitude towards former Confederates, and because
he was conservative on the negro question. A schism among the Republican
supporters of the war was with difficulty averted in 1864, when Frémont
threatened to lead the radicals in opposition to the "Union" party of
the President and his conservative policy.

The breach was widened by the refusal of Congress to admit
representatives from Arkansas and Louisiana in 1864 and to count the
electoral vote of Louisiana and Tennessee in 1865. The passage of the
Wade-Davis reconstruction bill in July, 1864, and the protests of its
authors after Lincoln's pocket veto called attention to the growing
opposition. Severe criticism caused Lincoln to withdraw the propositions
which he had made in April, 1865, with regard to the restoration of
Virginia. In his last public speech he referred with regret to the
growing spirit of vindictiveness toward the South. Much of the
opposition to Lincoln's Southern policy was based not on radicalism,
that is, not on any desire for a revolutionary change in the South, but
upon a belief that Congress and not the Executive should be entrusted
with the work of reorganizing the Union. Many congressional leaders were
willing to have Congress itself carry through the very policies which
Lincoln had advocated; and a majority of the Northern people would have
endorsed them without much caring who was to execute them.

The murder of Lincoln, the failure of the radicals to shape Johnson's
policy as they had hoped, and the continuing reaction against the
excessive expansion of the executive power added strength to the
opposition. But it was a long fight before the radical leaders won.
Their victory was due to adroit tactics on their own part and to
mistakes, bad judgment, and bad manners on the part of the President.
When all hope of controlling Johnson had been given up, Thaddeus Stevens
and other leaders of similar views began to contrive means to circumvent
him. On December 1, 1865, before Congress met, a caucus of radicals held
in Washington agreed that a joint committee of the two Houses should be
selected to which should be referred matters relating to reconstruction.
This plan would thwart the more conservative Senate and gain a desirable
delay in which the radicals might develop their campaign. The next day
at a caucus of the Union party the plan went through without arousing
the suspicion of the supporters of the Administration. Next, through the
influence of Stevens, Edward McPherson, the clerk of the House, omitted
from the roll call of the House the names of the members from the South.
The radical program was then adopted and a week later the Senate
concurred in the action of the House as to the appointment of a Joint
Committee on Reconstruction.

On the issues before Congress both Houses were split into rather clearly
defined factions: the extreme radicals with such leaders as Stevens,
Sumner, Wade, and Boutwell; the moderate Republicans, chief among whom
were Fessenden and Trumbull; the administration Republicans led by
Raymond, Doolittle, Cowan, and Dixon; and the Democrats, of whom the
ablest were Reverdy Johnson, Guthrie, and Hendricks. All except the
extreme radicals were willing to support the President or to come to
some fairly reasonable compromise. But at no time were they given an
opportunity to get together. Johnson and the administration leaders did
little in this direction and the radicals made the most skillful use of
the divisions among the conservatives.

Whatever final judgment may be passed upon the radical reconstruction
policy and its results, there can be no doubt of the political dexterity
of those who carried it through. Chief among them was Thaddeus Stevens,
vindictive and unscrupulous, filled with hatred of the Southern leaders,
bitter in speech and possessing to an extreme degree the faculty of
making ridiculous those who opposed him. He advocated confiscation, the
proscription or exile of leading whites, the granting of the franchise
and of lands to the negroes, and in Southern States the establishment of
territorial governments under the control of Congress. These States
should, he said, "never be recognized as capable of acting in the Union
... until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what
the makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendancy to the
party of the Union."

Charles Sumner, the leader of the radicals in the Senate, was moved less
than Stevens by personal hostility toward the whites of the South, but
his sympathy was reserved entirely for the blacks. He was unpractical,
theoretical, and not troubled by constitutional scruples. To him the
Declaration of Independence was the supreme law and it was the duty of
Congress to express its principles in appropriate legislation. Unlike
Stevens, who had a genuine liking for the negro, Sumner's sympathy for
the race was purely intellectual; for the individual negro he felt
repulsion. His views were in effect not different from those of Stevens.
And he was practical enough not to overlook the value of the negro vote.
"To my mind," he said, "nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity
of suffrage for all colored persons in the disorganized States. It will
not be enough if you give it to those who read and write; you will not,
in this way, acquire the voting force which you need there for the
protection of unionists, whether white or black. You will not secure the
new allies who are essential to the national cause." A leader of the
second rank was his colleague Henry Wilson, who was also actuated by a
desire for the negro's welfare and for the perpetuation of the
Republican party, which he said contained in its ranks "more of moral
and intellectual worth than was ever embodied in any political
organization in any land ... created by no man or set of men but brought
into being by Almighty God himself ... and endowed by the Creator with
all political power and every office under Heaven." Shellabarger of Ohio
was another important figure among the radicals. The following extract
from one of his speeches gives an indication of his character and
temperament: "They [the Confederates] framed iniquity and universal
murder into law.... Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon
every sea. They carved the bones of the dead heroes into ornaments, and
drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your
fountains, put mines under your soldiers' prisons; organized bands whose
leaders were concealed in your homes; and commissions ordered the torch
and yellow fever to be carried to your cities and to your women and
children. They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake
Ontario to the Missouri."

Among the lesser lights may be mentioned Morton and Wade, both bluff,
coarse, and ungenerous, and thoroughly convinced that the Republican
party had a monopoly of loyalty, wisdom, and virtues, and that by any
means it must gain and keep control; Boutwell, fanatical and mediocre;
and Benjamin Butler, a charlatan and demagogue. As a class the Western
radicals were less troubled by humanitarian ideals than were those of
the East and sought more practical political results.

The Joint Committee on Reconstruction which finally decided the fate of
the Southern States was composed of eight radicals, four moderate
Republicans, and three Democrats. As James Gillespie Blaine wrote later,
"it was foreseen that in an especial degree the fortunes of the
Republican party would be in the keeping of the fifteen men who might be
chosen." This committee was divided into four subcommittees to take
testimony. The witnesses, all of whom were examined at Washington,
included army officers and Bureau agents who had served in the South,
Southern Unionists, a few politicians, and several former Confederates,
among them General Robert E. Lee and Alexander H. Stephens. Most of the
testimony was of the kind needed to support the contentions of the
radicals that negroes were badly treated in the South; that the whites
were disloyal; that, should they be left in control, the negro, free
labor, the nation, and the Republican party would be in danger; that the
army and the Freedmen's Bureau must be kept in the South; and that a
radical reconstruction was necessary. No serious effort, however, was
made to ascertain the actual conditions in the South. Slow to formulate
a definite plan, the Joint Committee guided public sentiment toward
radicalism, converted gradually the Republican Congressmen, and little
by little undermined the power and influence of the President.

Not until after the new year was it plain that there was to be a fight
to the finish between Congress and the President. Congress had refused
in December, 1865, to accept the President's program, but there was
still hope for a compromise. Many conservatives had voted for the delay
merely to assert the rights of Congress; but the radicals wanted time to
frame a program. The Northern Democrats were embarrassingly cordial in
their support of Johnson and so also were most Southerners. The
moderates were not far away from the position of the President and the
administration Republicans. But the radicals skillfully postponed a test
of strength until Stevens and Sumner were ready. The latter declared
that a generation must elapse "before the rebel communities have so far
been changed as to become safe associates in a common government. Time,
therefore, we must have. Through time all other guarantees may be
obtained; but time itself is a guarantee."

To the Joint Committee were referred without debate all measures
relating to reconstruction, but the Committee was purposely making
little progress--contented merely to take testimony and to act as a
clearing house for the radical "facts" about "Southern outrages" while
waiting for the tide to turn. The "Black Laws" and the election of
popular Confederate leaders to office in the South were effectively used
to alarm the friends of the negroes, and the reports from the Bureau
agents gave support to those who condemned the Southern state
governments as totally inadequate and disloyal.

So apparent was the growth of radicalism that the President, alarmed by
the attitude of Sumner and Stevens and their followers, began to fear
for the Constitution and forced the fight. The passage of a bill on
February 6, 1866, extending the life of the Freedmen's Bureau furnished
the occasion for the beginning of the open struggle. On the 19th of
February Johnson vetoed the bill, and the next day an effort was made to
pass it over the veto. Not succeeding in this attempt, the House of
Representatives adopted a concurrent resolution that Senators and
Representatives from the Southern States should be excluded until
Congress declared them entitled to representation. Ten days later the
Senate also adopted the resolution.

Though it was not yet too late for Johnson to meet the conservatives of
Congress on middle ground, he threw away his opportunity by an
intemperate and undignified speech on the 22d of February to a crowd at
the White House. As usual when excited, he forgot the proprieties and
denounced the radicals as enemies of the Union and even went so far as
to charge Stevens, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips with endeavoring to
destroy the fundamental principles of the government. Such conduct
weakened his supporters and rejoiced his enemies. It was expected that
Johnson would approve the bill to confer civil rights upon the negroes,
but, goaded perhaps by the speeches of Stevens, he vetoed it on the 27th
of March. Its patience now exhausted, Congress passed the bill over the
President's veto. To secure the requisite majority in the Senate,
Stockton, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, was unseated on technical
grounds, and Senator Morgan, who was "paired" with a sick colleague,
broke his word to vote aye--for which Wade offensively thanked God. The
moderates had now fallen away from the President and at least for this
session of Congress his policies were wrecked. On the 16th of July the
supplementary Freedmen's Bureau Act was passed over the veto, and on the
24th of July Tennessee was readmitted to representation by a law the
preamble of which asserted unmistakably that Congress had assumed
control of reconstruction.

Meanwhile the Joint Committee on Reconstruction had made a report
asserting that the Southerners had forfeited all constitutional rights,
that their state governments were not in constitutional form, and that
restoration could be accomplished only when Congress and the President
acted together in fixing the terms of readmission. The uncompromising
hostility of the South, the Committee asserted, made necessary adequate
safeguards which should include the disfranchisement of the white
leaders, either negro suffrage or a reduction of white representation,
and repudiation of the Confederate war debt with recognition of the
validity of the United States debt. These terms were embodied in the
Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted by Congress and sent to the
States on June 13, 1866.

In the congressional campaign of 1866 reconstruction was almost the sole
issue. For success the Administration must gain at least one-third of
one house, while the radicals were fighting for two-thirds of each
House. If the Administration should fail to make the necessary gain, the
work accomplished by the Presidents would be destroyed. The campaign was
bitter and extended through the summer and fall. Four national
conventions were held: the National Union party at Philadelphia made a
respectable showing in support of the President; the Southern Unionists,
guided by the Northern radicals met at the same place; a soldiers' and
sailors' convention at Cleveland supported the Administration; and
another convention of soldiers and sailors at Pittsburgh endorsed the
radical policies. A convention of Confederate soldiers and sailors at
Memphis endorsed the President, but the Southern support and that of the
Northern Democrats did not encourage moderate Republicans to vote for
the Administration. Three members of Johnson's Cabinet--Harlan, Speed,
and Dennison--resigned because they were unwilling to follow their chief
further in opposing Congress.

The radicals had plenty of campaign material in the testimony collected
by the Joint Committee, in the reports of the Freedmen's Bureau, and in
the bloody race riots which had occurred in Memphis and New Orleans. The
greatest blunder of the Administration was Johnson's speechmaking tour
to the West which he called "Swinging Around the Circle." Every time he
made a speech he was heckled by persons in the crowd, lost his temper,
denounced Congress and the radical leaders, and conducted himself in an
undignified manner. The election returns showed more than a two-thirds
majority in each House against the President. The Fortieth Congress
would therefore be safely radical, and in consequence the Thirty-ninth
was encouraged to be more radical during its last session.

Public interest now for a time turned to the South, where the Fourteenth
Amendment was before the state legislatures. The radicals, taunted with
having no plan of reconstruction beyond a desire to keep the Southern
States out of the Union, professed to see in the ratification of the
Fourteenth Amendment a good opportunity to readmit the States on a safe
basis. The elections of 1866 had pointed to the ratification of the
proposed amendment as an essential preliminary to readmission. But would
additional demands be made upon the South? Sumner, Stevens, and
Fessenden were sure that negro suffrage also must come, but Wade, Chase,
Garfield, and others believed that nothing beyond the terms of the
Fourteenth Amendment would be asked.

In the Southern legislatures there was little disposition to ratify the
amendment. The rapid development of the radical policies during 1866 had
convinced most Southerners that nothing short of a general humiliation
and complete revolution in the South would satisfy the dominant party,
and there were few who wished to be "parties to our own dishonor." The
President advised the States not to accept the amendment, but several
Southern leaders favored it, fearing that worse would come if they
should reject it. Only in the legislatures of Alabama and Florida was
there any serious disposition to accept the amendment; and in the end
all the unreconstructed States voted adversely during the fall and
winter of 1866-67. This unanimity of action was due in part to the
belief that, even if the amendment were ratified, the Southern States
would still be excluded, and in part to the general dislike of the
proscriptive section which would disfranchise all Confederates of
prominence and result in the breaking up of the state governments. The
example of unhappy Tennessee, which had ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment and had been readmitted, was not one to encourage conservative
people in the other Southern States.

The rejection of the amendment put the question of reconstruction
squarely before Congress. There was no longer a possibility of
accomplishing the reconstruction of the Southern States by means of
constitutional amendments. Some of the Border and Northern States were
already showing signs of uneasiness at the continued exclusion of the
South. But if the Constitutional Amendment had failed, other means of
reconstruction were at hand, for the radicals now controlled the
Thirty-ninth Congress, from which the Southern representatives were
excluded, and would also control the Fortieth Congress.

Under the lead of Stevens and Sumner the radicals now perfected their
plans. On January 8, 1867, their first measure, conferring the franchise
upon negroes in the District of Columbia, was passed over the
presidential veto, though the proposal had been voted down a few weeks
earlier by a vote of 6525 to 35 in Washington and 812 to 1 in
Georgetown. In the next place, by an act of January 31, 1867, the
franchise was extended to negroes in the territories, and on March 2,
1867, three important measures were enacted: the Tenure of Office Act
and a rider to the Army Appropriation Act--both designed to limit the
power of the President--and the first Reconstruction Act. By the Tenure
of Office Act the President was prohibited from removing officeholders
except with the consent of the Senate; and by the Army Act he was
forbidden to issue orders except through General Grant or to relieve him
of command or to assign him to command away from Washington unless at
the General's own request or with the previous approval of the Senate.
The first measure was meant to check the removal of radical
officeholders by Johnson, and the other, which was secretly drawn up for
Boutwell by Stanton, was designed to prevent the President from
exercising his constitutional command of the army.

The first Reconstruction Act declared that no legal state government
existed in the ten unreconstructed States and that there was no adequate
protection for life and property. The Johnson and Lincoln governments in
those States were declared to have no legal status and to be subject
wholly to the authority of the United States to modify or abolish. The
ten States were divided into five military districts, over each of which
a general officer was to be placed in command. Military tribunals were
to supersede the civil courts where necessary. Stevens was willing to
rest here, though some of his less radical followers, disliking military
rule but desiring to force negro suffrage, inserted a provision in the
law that a State might be readmitted to representation upon the
following conditions: a constitutional convention must be held, the
members of which were elected by males of voting age without regard to
color, excluding whites who would be disfranchised by the proposed
Fourteenth Amendment; a constitution including the same rule of suffrage
must be framed, ratified by the same electorate, and approved by
Congress; and lastly, the legislatures elected under this constitution
must ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, after which, if the
Fourteenth Amendment should have become a part of the Federal
Constitution, the State should be readmitted to representation.

In order that the administration of this radical legislation might be
supervised by its friends, the Thirty-ninth Congress had passed a law
requiring the Fortieth Congress to meet on the 4th of March instead of
in December as was customary. According to the Reconstruction Act of the
2nd of March it was left to the state government or to the people of a
State to make the first move towards reconstruction. If they preferred,
they might remain under military rule. Either by design or by
carelessness no machinery of administration was provided for the
execution of the act. When it became evident that the Southerners
preferred military rule the new Congress passed a Supplementary
Reconstruction Act on the 23d of March designed to force the earlier act
into operation. The five commanding generals were directed to register
the blacks of voting age and the whites who were not disfranchised, to
hold elections for conventions, to call the conventions, to hold
elections to ratify or reject the constitutions, and to forward the
constitutions, if ratified, to the President for transmission to
Congress.

In these reconstruction acts the whole doctrine of radicalism was put on
the way to accomplishment. Its spread had been rapid. In December, 1865,
the majority of Congress would have accepted with little modification
the work of Lincoln and Johnson. Three months later the Civil Rights Act
measured the advance. Very soon the new Freedmen's Bureau Act and the
Fourteenth Amendment indicated the rising tide of radicalism. The
campaign of 1866 and the attitude of the Southern States swept all
radicals and most moderate Republicans swiftly into a merciless course
of reconstruction. Moderate reconstruction had nowhere strong support.
Congress, touched in its amour propre by presidential disregard, was
eager for extremes. Johnson, who regarded himself as defending the
Constitution against radical assaults, was stubborn, irascible, and
undignified, and with his associates was no match in political strategy
for his radical opponents.

The average Republican or Unionist in the North, if he had not been
brought by skillful misrepresentation to believe a new rebellion
impending in the South, was at any rate painfully alive to the fear that
the Democratic party might regain power. With the freeing of the slaves
the representation of the South in Congress would be increased. At first
it seemed that the South might divide in politics as before the war, but
the longer the delay the more the Southern whites tended to unite into
one party acting with the Democrats. With their eighty-five
representatives and a slight reaction in the North, they might gain
control of the lower House of Congress. The Union-Republican party had a
majority of less than one hundred in 1866 and this was lessened slightly
in the Fortieth Congress. The President was for all practical purposes a
Democrat again. The prospect was too much for the very human politicians
to view without distress. Stevens, speaking in support of the Military
Reconstruction Bill, said:

There are several good reasons for the passage of this bill. In the
first place, it is just. I am now confining my argument to negro
suffrage in the rebel States. Have not loyal blacks quite as good a
right to choose rulers and make laws as rebel whites? In the second
place, it is necessary in order to protect the loyal white men in the
seceded States. With them the blacks would act in a body, and it is
believed that in each of these States, except one, the two united would
form a majority, control the States, and protect themselves. Now they
are the victims of daily murder. They must suffer constant persecution
or be exiled. Another good reason is that it would insure the ascendancy
of the union party.... I believe ... that on the continued ascendancy of
that party depends the safety of this great nation. If impartial
suffrage is excluded in the rebel States, then every one of them is sure
to send a solid rebel electoral vote. They, with their kindred
Copperheads of the North, would always elect the President and control
Congress.

The laws passed on the 2d and the 23d of March were war measures and
presupposed a continuance of war conditions. The Lincoln-Johnson state
governments were overturned; Congress fixed the qualifications of voters
for that time and for the future; and the President, shorn of much of
his constitutional power, could exercise but little control over the
military government. Nothing that a State might do would secure
restoration until it should ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Federal Constitution. The war had been fought upon the theory that the
old Union must be preserved; but the basic theory of the reconstruction
was that a new Union was to be created.




CHAPTER VI.

The Rule of the Major Generals

From the passage of the reconstruction acts to the close of Johnson's
Administration, Congress, working the will of the radical majority, was
in supreme control. The army carried out the will of Congress and to
that body, not to the President, the commanding general and his
subordinates looked for direction.

The official opposition of the President to the policy of Congress
ceased when that policy was enacted into law. He believed this
legislation to be unconstitutional, but he considered it his duty to
execute the laws. He at once set about the appointment of generals to
command the military districts created in the South, ¹ a task calling
for no little discretion, since much depended upon the character of
these military governors, or "satraps," as they were frequently called
by the opposition. The commanding general in a district was charged with
many duties, military, political, and administrative. It was his duty to
carry on a government satisfactory to the radicals and not too
irritating to the Southern whites; at the same time he must execute the
reconstruction acts by putting old leaders out of power and negroes in.
Violent opposition to this policy on the part of the South was not
looked for. Notwithstanding the "Southern outrage" campaign, it was
generally recognized in government circles that conditions in the
seceded States had gradually been growing better since the close of the
war. There was in many regions, to be sure, a general laxity in
enforcing laws, but that had always been characteristic of the newer
parts of the South. The Civil Rights Act was generally in force, the
"Black Laws" had been suspended, and the Freedmen's Bureau was
everywhere caring for the negroes. What disorder existed was of recent
origin and in the main was due to the unsettling effects of the debates
in Congress and to the organization of the negroes for political
purposes.

¹ The first five generals appointed were Schofield, Sickles, Pope, Ord,
and Sheridan. None of these remained in his district until
reconstruction was completed. To Schofield's command in the first
district succeeded in turn Stoneman, Webb, and Canby; Sickles gave way
to Canby, and Pope to Meade; Ord in the fourth district was followed by
Gillem, McDowell, and Ames; Sheridan, in the fifth, was succeeded by
Griffen, Mower, Hancock, Buchanan, Reynolds, and Canby. Some of the
generals were radical; others, moderate and tactful. The most extreme
were Sheridan, Pope, and Sickles. Those most acceptable to the whites
were Hancock, Schofield, and Meade. General Grant himself became more
radical in his actions as he became involved in the fight between
Congress and the President.

Military rule was established in the South with slight friction, but it
was soon found that the reconstruction laws were not sufficiently clear
on two points: first, whether there was any limit to the authority of
the five generals over the local and state governments and, if so,
whether the limiting authority was in the President; and second, whether
the disfranchising provisions in the laws were punitive and hence to be
construed strictly. Attorney-General Stanbery, in May and June, 1867,
drew up opinions in which he maintained that the laws were to be
considered punitive and therefore to be construed strictly. After
discussions in cabinet meetings these opinions received the approval of
all except Stanton, Secretary of War, who had already joined the radical
camp. The Attorney-General's opinion was sent out to the district
commanders for their information and guidance. But Congress did not
intend to permit the President or his Cabinet to direct the process of
reconstruction, and in the Act of July 19, 1867, it gave a radical
interpretation to the reconstruction legislation, declared itself in
control, gave full power to General Grant and to the district commanders
subject only to Grant, directed the removal of all local officials who
opposed the reconstruction policies, and warned the civil and military
officers of the United States that none of them should "be bound in his
action by any opinion of any civil officer of the United States." This
interpretive legislation gave a broad basis for the military government
and resulted in a severe application of the disfranchising provisions of
the laws.

The rule of the five generals lasted in all the States until June, 1868,
and continued in Mississippi, Texas, Virginia, and Georgia until 1870.
There had been, to be sure, some military government in 1865, subject,
however, to the President, and from 1865 to 1867 the army, along with
the Freedmen's Bureau, had exerted a strong influence in the government
of the South, but in the régime now inaugurated the military was
supreme. The generals had a superior at Washington, but whether it was
the President, General Grant, or Congress was not clear until the Act of
July 19, 1867 made Congress the source of authority.

The power of the generals most strikingly appeared in their control of
the state governments which were continued as provisional organizations.
Since no elections were permitted, all appointments and removals were
made from military headquarters, which soon became political beehives,
centers of wirepulling and agencies for the distribution of spoils. At
the outset civil officers were ordered to retain their offices during
good behavior, subject to military control. But no local official was
permitted to use his influence ever so slightly against reconstruction.
Since most of them did not favor the policy of Congress, thousands were
removed as "obstacles to reconstruction." The Governors of Georgia,
Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas were displaced and others
appointed in their stead. All kinds of subordinate offices rapidly
became vacant. New appointments were nearly always carpetbaggers and
native radicals who could take the "ironclad" oath. The generals
complained that there were not enough competent native "loyalists" to
fill the offices, and frequently an army officer was installed as
governor, treasurer, secretary of state, auditor, or mayor. In nearly
all towns the police force was reorganized and former Federal soldiers
were added to the force, while the regular troops were used for general
police purposes and for rural constabulary.

Over the administration of justice the military authorities exercised a
close supervision. Instructions were sent out to court officers covering
the selection of juries, the suspension of certain laws, and the rules
of evidence and procedure. Courts were often closed, court decrees set
aside or modified, prisoners released, and many cases reserved for trial
by military commission. Some commanders required juries to admit negro
members and insisted that all jurors take the "ironclad" test oath.
There was some attempt at regulating the Federal courts but without much
success.

Since the state legislatures were forbidden to meet, much legislation
was enacted through military orders. Stay laws were enacted, the color
line was abolished, new criminal regulations were promulgated, and the
police power was invoked in some instances to justify sweeping measures,
such as the prohibition of whisky manufacture in North Carolina and
South Carolina. The military governors levied, increased, or decreased
taxes and made appropriations which the state treasurers were forced to
pay, but they restrained the radical conventions, all of which wished to
spend much money. According to the Act of March 23, 1867, the generals
and their appointees were to be paid by the United States, but in
practice the running expenses of reconstruction were paid by the state
treasurers.

Any attempt to favor the Confederate soldiers was frowned upon. Laws
providing wooden legs and free education for crippled Confederates were
suspended. Militia organizations and military schools were forbidden. No
uniform might be worn, no parades were permitted, no memorial and
historical societies were to be organized, and no meeting of any kind
could be held without a permit. The attempt to control the press
resulted in what one general called "a horrible uproar." Editors were
forbidden to express themselves too strongly against reconstruction;
public advertising and printing were awarded only to those papers
actively supporting reconstruction. Several newspapers were suppressed,
a notable example being the Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor, whose
editor, Ryland Randolph, was a picturesque figure in Alabama journalism
and a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

The military administration was thorough, and, as a whole honest and
efficient. With fewer than ten thousand soldiers the generals maintained
order and carried on the reconstruction of the South. The whites made no
attempt at resistance, though they were irritated by military rule and
resented the loss of self-government. But most Southerners preferred the
rule of the army to the alternative reign of the carpetbagger, scalawag,
and negro. The extreme radicals at the North, on the other hand, were
disgusted at the conservative policy of the generals. The apathy of the
whites at the beginning of the military reconstruction excited surprise
on all sides. Not only was there no violent opposition, but for a few
weeks there was no opposition at all. The civil officials were openly
unsympathetic, and the newspapers voiced dissent not untouched with
disgust; others simply could not take the situation seriously because it
seemed so absurd; many leaders were indifferent, while others--among
them, Generals Lee, Beauregard, and Longstreet, and Governor
Patton--without approving the policy, advised the whites to coöperate
with the military authorities and save all they could out of the
situation. General Beauregard, for instance, wrote in 1867: "If the
suffrage of the negro is properly handled and directed we shall defeat
our adversaries with their own weapons. The negro is Southern born. With
education and property qualifications he can be made to take an interest
in the affairs of the South and in its prosperity. He will side with the
whites."

Northern observers who were friendly to the South or who disapproved of
this radical reconstruction saw the danger more clearly than the
Southerners themselves, who seemed not to appreciate the full
implication of the situation. In this connection the New York Herald
remarked:

We may regard the entire ten unreconstructed Southern States, with
possibly one or two exceptions, as forced by a secret and overwhelming
revolutionary influence to a common and inevitable fate. They are all
bound to be governed by blacks spurred on by worse than blacks--white
wretches who dare not show their faces in respectable society anywhere.
This is the most abominable phase barbarism has assumed since the dawn
of civilization. It was all right and proper to put down the rebellion.
It was all right perhaps to emancipate the slaves.... But it is not
right to make slaves of white men even though they may have been former
masters of blacks. This is but a change in a system of bondage that is
rendered the more odious and intolerable because it has been inaugurated
in an enlightened instead of a dark and uncivilized age.

The political parties rapidly grouped themselves for the coming
struggle. The radical Republican party indeed was in process of
organization in the South even before the passage of the reconstruction
acts. Its membership was made up of negroes, carpetbaggers, or Northern
men who had come in as speculators, officers of the Freedmen's Bureau
and of the army, scalawags or Confederate renegades, "Peace Society"
men, ¹ and Unionists of Civil War times, with a few old Whigs who could
not yet bring themselves to affiliate with the Democrats. At first it
seemed that a respectable number of whites might be secured for the
radical party, but the rapid organization of the negroes checked the
accession of whites. In the winter and spring of 1866-67 the negroes
near the towns were well organized by the Union League and the
Freedmen's Bureau and then, after the passage of the reconstruction
acts, the organizing activities of the radical chieftains shifted to the
rural districts. The Union League was greatly extended; Union League
conventions were held to which local whites were not admitted; and the
formation of a black man's party was well on the way before the
registration of the voters was completed. Visiting statesmen from the
North, among them Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and "Pig Iron" Kelley of
Pennsylvania, toured the South in support of the radical program, and
the registrars and all Federal officials aided in the work.

¹ See The Day of the Confederacy, by Nathaniel W. Stephenson (in The
Chronicles of America), p. 121, footnote.

The whites, slow to comprehend the real extent of radicalism, were
finally aroused to the necessity of organizing, if they were to
influence the negro and have a voice in the conventions. The old party
divisions were still evident. With difficulty a portion of the Whigs
were brought with the Democrats into one conservative party during the
summer and fall of 1867, though many still held aloof. The lack of the
old skilled leadership was severely felt. In places where the white
man's party was given a name it was called "Democratic and
Conservative," to spare the feelings of former Whigs who were loath to
bear the party name of their quondam opponents.

The first step in the military reconstruction was the registration of
voters. In each State a central board of registrars was appointed by the
district commander and a local board for every county and large town.
Each board consisted of three members--all radicals--who were required
to subscribe to the "ironclad" oath. In several States one negro was
appointed to each local board. The registrars listed negro voters during
the day, and at night worked at the organization of a radical Republican
party. The prospective voters were required to take the oath prescribed
in the Reconstruction Act, but the registrars were empowered to go
behind the oath and investigate the Confederate record of each
applicant. This authority was invoked to carry the disfranchisement of
the whites far beyond the intention of the law in an attempt to destroy
the leadership of the whites and to register enough negroes to outvote
them at the polls. For this purpose the registration was continued until
October 1, 1867, and an active campaign of education and organization
carried on.

At the close of the registration, 703,000 black voters were on the rolls
and 627,000 whites. In Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and
Mississippi there were black majorities, and in the other States the
blacks and the radical whites together formed majorities. The white
minorities included several thousand who had been rejected by the
registrars but restored by the military commanders. Though large numbers
of blacks were dropped from the revised rolls as fraudulently
registered, the registration statistics nevertheless bore clear witness
to the political purpose of those who compiled them.

Next followed a vote on the question of holding a state convention and
the election of delegates to such a convention if held--a double
election. The whites, who had been harassed in the registration and who
feared race conflicts at the elections, considered whether they ought
not to abstain from voting. By staying away from the polls, they might
bring the vote cast in each State below a majority and thus defeat the
proposed conventions for, unless a majority of the registered voters
actually cast ballots either for or against a convention, no convention
could be held. Nowhere, however, was this plan of not voting fully
carried out, for, though most whites abstained, enough of them voted
(against the conventions, of course) to make the necessary majority in
each State. The effect of the abstention policy upon the personnel of
the conventions was unfortunate. In every convention there was a radical
majority with a conservative and all but negligible minority. In South
Carolina and Louisiana there were negro majorities. In every State
except North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia the negroes and the
carpetbaggers together were in the majority over native whites. The
conservative whites were of fair ability; the carpetbaggers and
scalawags produced in each convention a few able leaders, but most of
them were conscienceless political soldiers of fortune; the negro
members were inexperienced, and most of them were quite ignorant, though
a few leaders of ability did appear among them. In Alabama, for example,
only two negro members could write, though half had been taught to sign
their names. They were barbers, field hands, hack drivers, and servants.
A negro chaplain was elected who invoked divine blessings on "unioners
and cusses on rebels." It was a sign of the new era when the convention
specially invited the "ladies of colored members" to seats in the
gallery.

The work of the conventions was for the most part cut and dried, the
abler members having reached a general agreement before they met. The
constitutions, mosaics of those of other States, were noteworthy only
for the provisions made to keep the whites out of power and to regulate
the relations of the races in social matters. The Texas constitution
alone contained no proscriptive clauses beyond those required by the
Fourteenth Amendment. The most thoroughgoing proscription of
Confederates was found in the constitutions of Mississippi, Alabama, and
Virginia; and in these States the voter must also purge himself of guilt
by agreeing to accept the "civil and political equality of all men" or
by supporting reconstruction. Only in South Carolina and Louisiana were
race lines abolished by law.

The legislative work of the conventions was more interesting than the
constitution making. By ordinance the legality of negro marriages was
dated from November, 1867, or some date later than had been fixed by the
white conventions of 1865. Mixed schools were provided in some States;
militia for the black districts but not for the white was to be raised;
while in South Carolina it was made a penal offense to call a person a
"Yankee" or a "nigger." Few of the negro delegates demanded proscription
of whites or social equality; they wanted schools and the vote. The
white radicals were more anxious to keep the former Confederates from
holding office than from voting. The generals in command everywhere used
their influence to secure moderate action by the conventions, and for
this they were showered with abuse.

As provided by the reconstruction acts, the new constitutions were
submitted to the electorate created by those instruments. Unless a
majority of the registered voters in a State should take part in the
election the reconstruction would fail and the State would remain under
military rule. The whites now inaugurated a more systematic policy of
abstention and in Alabama, on February 4, 1868, succeeded in holding the
total vote below a majority. Congress then rushed to the rescue of
radicalism with the act of the 11th of March, which provided that a mere
majority of those voting in the State was sufficient to inaugurate
reconstruction. Arkansas had followed the lead of Alabama, but too late;
in Mississippi the constitution was defeated by a majority vote; in
Texas the convention had made no provision for a vote; and in Virginia
the commanding general, disapproving of the work of the convention,
refused to pay the expenses of an election. In the other six States the
constitutions were adopted. ¹

¹ Except in Texas, the work of constitution making was completed between
November 5, 1867, and May 18, 1868.

These elections gave rise to more violent contests than before. They
also were double elections, as the voters cast ballots for state and
local officials and at the same time for or against the constitution.
The radical nominations were made by the Union League and the Freedmen's
Bureau, and nearly all radicals who had been members of conventions were
nominated and elected to office. The negroes, expecting now to reap some
benefits of reconstruction, frequently brought sacks to the polls to
"put the franchise in." The elections were all over by June, 1868, and
the newly elected legislatures promptly ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment.

It now remained for Congress to approve the work done in the South and
to readmit the reorganized States. The case of Alabama gave some
trouble. Even Stevens, for a time, thought that this State should stay
out; but there was danger in delay. The success of the abstention policy
in Alabama and Arkansas and the reviving interest of the whites
foreshadowed white majorities in some places; the scalawags began to
forsake the radical party for the conservatives; and there were
Democratic gains in the North in 1867. Only six States, New York and
five New England States, allowed the negro to vote, while four States,
Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, and Ohio, voted down negro suffrage after
the passage of the reconstruction acts. The ascendancy of the radicals
in Congress was menaced. The radicals needed the support of their
radical brethren in Southern States and they could not afford to wait
for the Fourteenth Amendment to become a part of the Constitution or to
tolerate other delay. On the 22d and the 25th of June acts were
therefore passed admitting seven States, Alabama included, to
representation in Congress upon the "fundamental condition" that "the
constitutions of neither of said States shall ever be so amended or
changed as to deprive any citizens or class of citizens of the United
States of the right to vote in said State, who are entitled to vote by
the constitution thereof herein recognized."

The generals now turned over the government to the recently elected
radical officials and retired into the background. Military
reconstruction was thus accomplished in all the States except Virginia,
Mississippi, and Texas.



CHAPTER VII.

The Trial of President Johnson

While the radical program was being executed in the South, Congress was
engaged not only in supervising reconstruction but in subduing the
Supreme Court and in "conquering" President Johnson. One must admire the
efficiency of the radical machine. When the Southerners showed that they
preferred military rule as permitted by the Act of the 2nd of March,
Congress passed the Act of the 23d of March which forced the
reconstruction. When the President ventured to assert his power in
behalf of a considerate administration of the reconstruction acts,
Congress took the power out of his hands by the law of the 19th of July.
The Southern plan to defeat the new state constitutions by abstention
was no sooner made clear in the case of Alabama than Congress came to
the rescue with the Act of March 11, 1868.

Had it seemed necessary, Congress would have handled the Supreme Court
as it did the Southerners. The opponents of radical reconstruction were
anxious to get the reconstruction laws of March, 1867, before the Court.
Chief Justice Chase was known to be opposed to military reconstruction,
and four other justices were, it was believed, doubtful of the
constitutionality of the laws. A series of conservative decisions gave
hope to those who looked to the Court for relief. The first decision, in
the case of ex parte Milligan, declared unconstitutional the trials of
civilians by military commissions when civil courts were open. A few
months later, in the cases of Cummings vs. Missouri and ex parte
Garland, the Court declared invalid, because ex post facto, the state
laws designed to punish former Confederates.

But the first attempts to get the reconstruction acts before the Supreme
Court failed. The State of Mississippi, in April, 1867, brought suit to
restrain the President from executing the reconstruction acts. The Court
refused to interfere with the Executive. A similar suit was then brought
against Secretary Stanton by Georgia with a like result. But in 1868, in
the case of ex parte McCardle, it appeared that the question of the
constitutionality of the reconstruction acts would be passed upon.
McCardle, a Mississippi editor arrested for opposition to reconstruction
and convicted by military commission, appealed to the Supreme Court,
which asserted its jurisdiction. But the radicals in alarm rushed
through Congress an act (March 27, 1868) which took away from the Court
its jurisdiction in cases arising under the reconstruction acts. The
highest court was thus silenced.

The attempt to remove the President from office was the only part of the
radical program that failed, and this by the narrowest of margins.
During the spring and summer of 1866 there was some talk among
politicians of impeaching President Johnson, and in December a
resolution was introduced by Representative Ashley of Ohio looking
toward impeachment. Though the committee charged with the investigation
of "the official conduct of Andrew Johnson" reported that enough
testimony had been taken to justify further inquiry, the House took no
action. There were no less than five attempts at impeachment during the
next year. Stevens, Butler, and others were anxious to get the President
out of the way, but the majority were as yet unwilling to impeach for
merely political reasons. There were some who thought that the radicals
had sufficient majorities to ensure all needed legislation and did not
relish the thought of Ben Wade in the presidency. ¹ Others considered
that no just grounds for action had been found in the several
investigations of Johnson's record. Besides, the President's authority
and influence had been much curtailed by the legislation relating to the
Freedmen's Bureau, tenure of office, reconstruction, and command of the
army, and Congress had also refused to recognize his amnesty and
pardoning powers.

¹ Senator Wade of Ohio was President pro tempore of the Senate and by
the act of 1791 would succeed President Johnson if he were removed from
office.

But the desire to impeach the President was increasing in power, and
very little was needed to provoke a trial of strength between the
radicals and the President. The drift toward impeachment was due in part
to the legislative reaction against the Executive, and in part to
Johnson's own opposition to reconstruction and to his use of the
patronage against the radicals. Specific grievances were found in his
vetoes of the various reconstruction bills, in his criticisms of
Congress and the radical leaders, and in the fact, as Stevens asserted,
that he was a "radical renegade." Johnson was a Southern man, an
old-line State Rights Democrat, somewhat anti-negro in feeling. He knew
no book except the Constitution, and that he loved with all his soul.
Sure of the correctness of his position, he was too stubborn to change
or to compromise. He was no more to be moved than Stevens or Sumner. To
overcome Johnson's vetoes required two-thirds of each House of Congress;
to impeach and remove him would require only a majority of the House and
two-thirds of the Senate.

The desired occasion for impeachment was furnished by Johnson's attempt
to get Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, out of the Cabinet.
Stanton held radical views and was at no time sympathetic with or loyal
to Johnson, but he loved office too well to resign along with those
cabinet members who could not follow the President in his struggle with
Congress. He was seldom frank and sincere in his dealings with the
President, and kept up an underhand correspondence with the radical
leaders, even assisting in framing some of the reconstruction
legislation which was designed to render Johnson powerless. In him the
radicals had a representative within the President's Cabinet.

Wearied of Stanton's disloyalty, Johnson asked him to resign and, upon a
refusal, suspended him in August, 1867, and placed General Grant in
temporary charge of the War Department. General Grant, Chief Justice
Chase, and Secretary McCulloch, though they all disliked Stanton,
advised the President against suspending him. But Johnson was
determined. About the same time he exercised his power in removing
Sheridan and Sickles from their commands in the South and replaced them
with Hancock and Canby. The radicals were furious, but Johnson had
secured at least the support of a loyal Cabinet.

T

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2897